Fauna follows the lead of the bacon-skinned Pig with a menagerie of twisted tales about the lives and times of our fellow-feeling creatures.
I guess I thought someone else would figure it out, or it would free itself or something..
So, I just left it.
So, I thought; ring the RSPCA, Jon, but if I\'m the only one who can see it\'s a real panda, they might end up locking me away instead.
Or it might get angry and start attacking me, or it might run off and hurt some kid.
I thought about trying to lift it off, but you shouldn\'t do that in case you hit an artery.
I didn\'t know what to do.
There was blood on the floor and the panda was squirming and crying out a bit.
And the poor bugger was still alive.
I was seeing a real-life panda skewered on a row of the railing spikes.
But I was seeing something else.
They were seeing a stuffed toy, like a teddy bear type thing, all synthetic fur and glass-bead eyes.
The people of the street; they weren\'t seeing the same thing I was.
And that\'s when I realised.
So how are you keeping Jon, are you well? But I\'m like
Gail, it\'s a panda! What should we do? And she\'s like; leave it, it\'s just some kid\'s toy.
And she\'s like; hmm, oh yeah aye.
A panda.
Check this out.
So, I knocked on to my neighbour, Gail, and she comes out and I\'m like
Gail.
So, I went up to it and I was like that to the kids who were playing out, I was like; who\'s is this panda, lads? And they were like; dunno, dunno mate and they didn\'t seem to care.
And the grass has got these railings all the way around it, for kids to kick their footballs off and stuff, and this panda was just there that morning, stuck on a row of the spikes, directly opposite my house.
Let me paint the picture: there\'s the road outside my house, then there\'s this long strip of grass, then there\'s the houses opposite. " - Tania Hershman, author of Some Of Us Glow More Than Others and My Mother Was An Upright Piano Extract: A Panda Appeared in Our Street A panda appeared in our street, skewered to the railing outside my house.
With humour and an incredible versatility in voice and style - not to mention technology-hacking rabbits and horses who time travel - Hartley asks us to look hard at our own world and never, ever, underestimate the animals.
The tension is found here on the edges and boundaries: human/animal, natural/man-made, happiness/horror.
Hartley is a brilliant storyteller, with the kind of imagination that leaves you feeling a bit fearful for your own safety." - Lucie McKnight Hardy (Author of Water Shall Refuse Them) "I haven\'t read anything quite like these brilliant, dark and often fairy-tailish short stories.
A startling collection, that begs to be read aloud.
David Hartley shows us a delightfully fresh way of looking at who should, really, be our closest friends." - Nik Perring (Author of Not So Perfect, Freaks!) "Fiercely original, these are stories that are at times disturbing, absurd, and darkly comedic, and which refuse to conform to the constraints of time and space. "Brilliant imagination and sharp storytelling aside, Dr.
There will be nowhere for the humans to hide.
There are guinea pigs in the underworld, elephants in a virtual world, vengeful birds from a far-off world, and so much more beastliness.
Fauna follows the lead of the bacon-skinned Pig with a menagerie of twisted tales about the lives and times of our fellow-feeling creatures
