Dan Darling is a bard of the baroque and broken I wrote at one point in the margin of his lyrical debut, Archaeopteryx. The prose of his novel sang on every page. Consider how a father didn’t slip into his birth language when weary, but instead “Spanish staged a coup inside his mouth.” When a friend smiled, “she smiled one of those gentle, genuine smiles that occupy people’s faces when their guard is down, like a squatter taking over a vulnerable house.” And in another place, “emptiness sat on her living room sofa in a jacket made of hat and shadows.”

What I hope these examples get across is not just the poetic quality of the writing, but also how all of these personifications convey the beautiful vulnerability of each of these characters. John Stick inhabits the center of the novel, a misfit giant zoologist who finds himself entangled in a web of mystery after ten thousand birds fall stricken from the sky in the deserts of the Bosque. His friends are fellow misfits who struggle in the land of the “Normals” including an ornithologist named Melodia, half of her face ravaged by tumors, and Spartacus Rex, “an outcast before he even left the womb.” In a world that is about to experience an apocalyptic release of hybrid monsters, including chupacabras, you root for these characters as a reader.

It’s not just the language and characters that draw you in as a reader, but the story itself. At one point one of the characters defines the word “chimera” a mythical beast that is part lion and goat and serpent. Dan Darling’s novel itself is a chimera, and not just in the title, which refers to a carnivorous creature transitioning from dinosaur into bird. Like a chimera, the story effectively blends noir mystery, speculative fiction, and even elements of dystopia into a fascinating, literary menagerie.

I teach with Dan Darling at Normandale, so I know he belonged to a small circus overseas at one point and that he’s skilled on a unicycle and once was a practicing magician. What I need to ask him is where in the world he learned so much about zoology. I loved moments like this as two of the characters discuss one of the fiercest insects I’ve ever heard of:

“If it’s a tarantula hawk, the larva will burrow into Jones’ abdomen. It’ll eat around the major organs, saving them for last. It’ll grow. It’ll mature. It’ll pupate, which only lasts for a day or so, and then it’ll become an adult.”

“And then?”

“It’ll rip through Jones abdomen wall and emerge, wet and beautiful,” I said. “Then we’ll know what we’ve got.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It is quite awful.” Most of nature was awful.

Melodia stood with her head cocked, watching the sleeping spider. “Isn’t there a kinder way to do this. Jones doesn’t seem like he deserves to die in such a gross way.”

“Death comes with being a spider,” I said. “It won’t be pleasant for him, but he’s a predator. He’s poisoned dozens of little insects and sucked their liquified guts out of them. This experience is part of his life cycle.”

Melodia fell down on one of her swivel stools. “You work with some terrible things, Stick. I believe they’re beginning to affect your worldview.”

So yes, there are grim moments, and there’s a musing melancholy that settles over the pages as these misfits try to stave off an apocalypse while also searching for a way to fit into a world that has discarded them, but this doesn’t mean it’s a heavy read, because on every page the humor and wit lighten the load. The dialogue is often genuinely funny. Perhaps that sounds like an absurd combination: humor and melancholy? Or maybe this, too, is part of the book’s chimeric chemistry. It works.

There are many other things I could write about here, from how vampire bats stalk their prey by running on their wingtips, the habits of Tasmanian devils, or how tarantulas hunt and kill. There’s an animal theologian who might be friend or femme fatale or foe, and my favorite, the chupacabra. Strange things creep and crawl and flit and flutter through this book. Deadly beasties that our zoologist has a mysterious affinity for.

“I knew one thing about a web,” John Stick thinks as the book speeds toward an explosive climax . “If a creature caught in the middle thrashed around enough, the entire structure would collapse. I was a big creature. It was time to start thrashing.”

I’ll leave it to you to discover what happens what he does.