In Yong’an city, beasts and humans coexist, but tension keeps a distance between them. “The beasts all want to eat people, just as people eat them,” the reader is told in Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China.

But as the book’s narrator investigates the lives of different species of beasts that roam the city, she finds that their stories are intertwined with her own, and that perhaps there is a bit of beast within every human.

A writer and amateur zoologist, the unnamed narrator is tasked with recording the stories of the beasts that both fascinate and appall the city’s human population. Sorrowful beasts prefer cold and dark places, and enjoy tangerine pudding and cauliflower. The males have scales on their left calf, fins attached to their right ear, and dark green skin around their belly button.

If a sorrowful beast smiles, she discovers, then they are doomed to death. Flourishing beasts are born from the soil and are skilled horticulturalists, while sacrificial beasts have low hanging ear lobes with saw-toothed edges, possess remarkable resilience, and are violent and suicidal. Some beasts have ancient histories, while others were crafted in labs as companions for humans.

Each species gets its own chapter, and what proceeds is part bestiary, part thriller. But what begins as a zoological investigation becomes personal for the narrator, as the beasts’ stories reveal secrets from her own past. The beasts prove remarkably human as they weave narratives of love, despair, and death.

Our narrator is never a passive observer of their world—she forms relationships with the beasts, “taming” some of them and inviting them into her home. She becomes embroiled in adventures that are dark, and sometimes brutal, as she discovers the painful secrets of the beasts’ nature and the cruelty of humans.

As she goes about recording her interactions with various beasts for her newspaper column, the narrator is mentored and often misled by a stubborn, at times infuriating professor and father figure. His clinical approach to research and apparent lack of sentimentality drives our narrator to rebellion.

Theirs is the central relationship in the book, and its intensity is always bubbling beneath the surface of Yan’s magical realist narrative. The professor looms large over all the twists, turns, and revelations that each encounter with a different beast brings. Yet he remains distant, and relays messages through his protégé, Zhong Liang, who becomes a sidekick to our narrator.