Two families become predator and prey in this macabre creature feature where every species must eat.
“Of course, they knew upon whom they dined—no one mentioned it.”
Two families enter the wilderness in Joshua David Robison’s The Antlered Ape. Only one of them is human.
Solace has brought his son William and grandchildren—thirteen-year-old Eve and nine-year-old River—into the backcountry on a hunting trip. On the other side of the woods, Vai’ra is raising Ur’sul, a young ape born with antlers unseen among his species for generations.
It’s an ominous premise made more so by Solace’s campfire folklore: humans once drove another apex ape to near extinction after harvesting too much and hunting too hard. Now the deer are disappearing again.
As sardonic as it is grotesque, The Antlered Ape knows when to be playful and when to be frightening. There’s an amusingly campy quality to its creature-feature nods: eerie noises in the night, horses on edge, and a family that only realizes something is wrong after they begin going in circles. Only Robison punctuates these familiar tropes with scenes of visceral violence, beginning with River struggling to bash the first trout he catches to death while his grandfather watches.
What makes that violence uneasy is the fact that it isn’t indulgent. Instead, it’s necessary for survival. One family may be hairless and the other furred, but Robison has them share the same basic impulses: parents protecting their children, children tasting adulthood, and families willing to kill when hunger demands. It’s the simplicity of that parallel that makes it terribly effective, as Solace and his family watch wolves descend on their mangled horses, and their own stomachs ache. Or, later, when River vomits up food that has a name. Who is the predator and who is the prey?
That isn’t an easy question to answer as the perspective shifts between families. Robison cleverly moves between three overlapping vantage points: humans looking into the woods for the monster, the woods looking back at the humans, and the creatures caught between. His prose has fantastic fluidity to it, at once lush and macabre, as though Edgar Allan Poe were writing an ode to the missing link.
It’s in the moments when those vantage points begin to bleed together that Robison’s careful balance falters. Vai’ra and Ur’sul feel the most real when their humanity slips through in their feelings and decisions instead of the things they say. At times, the primates’ dialogue becomes a little too modern, punctuated by f-bombs and phrases that chip away at the illusion.
There’s the question, too, of Eve and River’s ages as the novel grows increasingly unflinching in its brutality, with scattered references to sexuality along the way. There are moments that, while not obscene, teeter toward feeling unnecessary rather than inevitable in the world Robison has created.
Yet for all its horror, The Antlered Ape has a tender underside in the relationships at its heart. Ur’sul is hidden away and grows into a cheerful little creature who wants to belong, while River has the energy of a Labrador retriever, sensitive but excited to be camping with his family. And then there’s Eve, a tween who wants to be treated as older and tougher than she actually is. For all William’s certainty that humans are superior to other species, Vai’ra’s protectiveness of Ur’sul is as recognizable as his own love for Eve and River. Even Ur’sul’s friendship with the sacred hare Grasshopper and raven Ivory forms its own strange little family, one of several relationships that make species seem increasingly beside the point.
Fundamentally, The Antlered Ape is less interested in monstrosity than in what creatures will do to survive. Robison leaves little distance between fur and skin once hunger, fear, and family enter the equation. What remains is a creature feature where the monster depends on which side of the woods you’re looking from.
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