The Animal on the Rock

The sun gives me comfort. The temperature outside calibrates the temperature of my body, and I know I am immortal when I’m on a rock.

After Irma’s mother dies, she boards a plane to the coast. Soon she is consumed by strange dreams and irrational fears, and her body begins to transform in ways as unexpected as they are natural. The skin over her joints grows thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and the border between reality and delirium becomes first elastic, then irrelevant. As the world around her tips out of balance-the weather turning volatile, strangers issuing cryptic warnings--she returns again and again to the rock where she undergoes metamorphosis: a series of radical mutations that enable her to survive.

Elemental and prophetic, intimate and universal, The Animal on the Rock bears witness to the terror and magnificence of being a child, a parent, a changing animal. A profoundly biological and introspective novel that lies somewhere between clinical record and fever dream.

Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant) and work by Paul B. Preciado, María Bastarós, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerdà, and Cristian Perfumo.