How soon is too soon to tackle a big word like “pandemic”? It’s been more than five years since the first COVID lockdown in the UK, but reading Geoff Ryman’s new novel Animals brought it all back with a vengeance. Teddy, the novel’s protagonist, lives in a village in rural Oxfordshire at the epicentre of a new pathogen which infects both humans and animals, harming the former but near-universally killing the latter. His quiet life amongst his family’s pets and livestock, home-schooled by his mother and visited by their gruff but fond cleaner with only intermittent contact with his father, is overturned as the animals around them sicken, die… and then begin to return, hungry and violent.

The novel is presented as an account by Teddy’s older self, who lives in a ravaged future world absent of most animal life. Here he writes of the beginnings of an event which dramatically changed the world. With such a setup, it’s easy to see how Ryman has accessed the feelings that characterised the COVID-19’s progression, creating a parallel but far more horrifying scenario. His novel is especially full of the tension and uncertainty that was abundant in 2020. But it also draws explicit, in-text parallels with Foot and Mouth disease, another spectre that haunts many Brits who were alive in the early 2000s.

Both outbreaks are easy pickings for achieving emotive impact. Yet Ryman hasn’t relied solely on evoking already-horrifying scenarios that still live in relatively fresh memory. Through intense immersion in the protagonist’s point of view (which is entirely powerless, as only a child’s can be), via brief glimpses of an awful future, and in focusing the lens of readers’ very tangible memories and experiences onto something more existential, Ryman manages also to craft an exquisitely horrifying reading experience that amplifies the emotions of the subject matter into something quite hard to sit through.

Part of the novel’s success lies in condensing a lot of the pain of the story into specific loci. First of these is Teddy’s beloved pet cat. Their close relationship is emphasised sufficiently that what follows the animal’s infection feels inevitable; but it still hurts to go through Teddy’s loss with him. Second, there is an ongoing thread of Teddy’s relationship with his father, who left his mother for a younger man, moved to London and visits irregularly, none of which Teddy forgives him for. A veterinary socio-pathologist working for a medical institute which is investigating the new pathogen, he returns to Teddy’s home and life for the lockdown, and provides a very personal friction alongside the greater unknowns of the worsening virus. The tension between them—the obvious pain and sadness and resentment in every interaction, every piece of dialogue—rings very true: here is a child failing to process grown-up concerns but being forced to deal with them regardless. This offers a very different kind of sadness that nevertheless harmonises with the growing dread of the wider story, not least because Teddy’s father is one of the few sources of good information as events unfold. Teddy himself is the other. His father’s science and his own growing instinctive awareness of the changing world balance each other out, even as their personalities clash.

The story shifts from the emphasis on pet onto father, and only then onto simply surviving the disaster. It ramps up this scale slowly, until Teddy is able to grasp, at least a little, how much is happening. This step-by-step approach allows the childish perspective to be maintained while still ratcheting up the tension towards wider and wider implications. Being able in this way to come to the big stuff while still authentically immersed in the more intimate viewpoint makes the novel’s horrors far more intense an experience.

That being said, there are some lapses in the coherence of the protagonist voice that undercut this immersion. While Teddy is described—early and often—as a strange child, and one who has spent very little time around other children, even this does not seem quite sufficient to account for some of the odd parentheticals that sometimes occur. These are usually moments of the older Teddy adding context about something from 2025 that is unavailable in the ravaged future, but their tone betrays an attitude that I find hard to associate with someone who was 10 in 2025:

Vacuum cleaners were electric machines that sucked up the lightest dust only and left everything else. That meant you swept up first, vacuumed, and then had to sweep up again. But you felt very modern and burned up electricity doing it.

Vacuum cleaners are hardly the vanguard of technology, and in fact we see plenty of examples in the text of Teddy handling much more modern equipment—he is the child of a parent who uses tablet time as a sparingly doled out treat. Something about this statement doesn’t quite ring true to the character. If it were a lone slip, it might be easily overlooked, but the majority of the parentheticals have this same tone—sneering at 2025. This is understandable for someone bitter and bereft of its comforts, but in a way that feels far more in character for someone older now. They betray prejudices—about the superficiality of social media or the failing university system, for instance—that feel out of kilter with the experiences of someone born in 2015 who simply can’t have yet encountered, and here never could, since the world falls apart through the events of the story. This feels trivial to pick at, but when so much of the success of the novel’s horror comes from being trapped in this child’s perspective, anything that breaks away from that viewpoint is a bump in the road.

There is also the matter of the future from which Teddy writes. It never really gets much in the way of explanation, which is fine on its own. But what snippets we do get do not quite provide enough information for the sweeping conclusion the narrator comes to at the end: despairing of a future for humanity at all, and absolutely certain that everything will die and simply form another layer of ash in the geological record. The events of the story have certainly felt wide-reaching and disastrous, but not so much so that this apocalyptic ending feels entirely as inevitable as he suggests. The text gives us enough to know Teddy reaches the age of forty. That’s a long time for things to cling onto functionality after the extremity of the story’s events, and so a little more information about the awful future might have given me just enough to be emotionally convinced of the inevitable destruction of it all.

Because, ultimately, that’s where the big jumpscare really lives. The death of Teddy’s father is horrible, but a conclusion that makes clear quite how small and easily washed away humanity is proves far more powerful. Ryman takes this novel from a personal story—the loss of a parent, the loss of a home, of pets, of a way of life—and turns it into one that takes place on a geological timescale. The fragility of human culture and existence—especially when tied to a real-world event that is still burned into recent memory—is raw and shocking. It would have been all the more so with just a little more persuasion that extinction is, truly, the only possible ending for these events.

I can’t say that I liked or enjoyed reading Animals. But I definitely felt, and kept on feeling, long after I’d put the book down, in a way I can’t help but admire for its intensity. Animals is the sort of exquisite torture that demands repetition, but also of a kind best suited to infrequency. Despite five years having passed since the heights of the pandemic which is mirrored in this story, Ryman manages to evoke those emotions vividly—and painfully. But if reliving those feelings wasn’t necessarily enjoyable, it was cathartic, or at least thought-provoking. There is something to be said for how Animals lingers, and not all of that is down simply to its resonance with a traumatising global event: Ryman’s recombination of those emotions touches on interesting new ground. The novel doesn’t quite bring it all together into a conclusion that results logically from its premises, but it achieves something, and it’s a something I cannot quite step away from.