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This review was first published at BriefEcology.com

A horsefly point-of-view. You read that right reader, this book contains chapters written from a horsefly’s point-of-view. It’s weird, disgusting, and kind of great.

My latest eco-fiction read was Mireille Gagné’s Horsefly, translated by Pablo Strauss and published by Coach House Books. The novel is a historical eco-horror tale, something akin to a modern Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that takes place across multiple timelines. The historical timeline follows a Canadian entomologist who joins a secretive military science operation during World War 2, while the interspersed chapters take place in the present and follow a factory worker who is unknowingly stalked by a horsefly with ambiguous ties to the WWII military project.

Without giving too much away, it would be easy to summarize this novel as a story about mad scientists overreaching, in the vein of Shelley. But the science at work in Horsefly isn’t mad, or solitary; it’s militarized and industrialized. The science here is weaponized, a domination of nature in order to turn it against humanity.

There’s a current of extinction and de-extinction anxiety under the surface of Horsefly. The past haunts the present, and things once thought to be gone can return, with a vengeance. Gagné plays with notions of agency, consciousness, and even the carnal and sexual pleasures of non-human species while critiquing militarized science and the impacts of a capitalist, industrialized society. The result is a strange, uncomfortable, and compelling read. I blew through this one in about a day and highly recommend it.