Zoo Books in Order

Zoo is a near future science fiction thriller that takes a simple nightmare, what if animals turned on us, and plays it out on a global scale. The story centers on Jackson Oz, a young biologist who has burned his academic bridges by insisting that something is badly wrong with the way mammals are behaving.

At the start, Oz is an outsider running a small, self funded research project and warning anyone who will listen about rising animal attacks that no one else takes seriously. A trip to Botswana, where he witnesses a coordinated lion assault that wipes out tourists across a wide area, convinces him the pattern is real. There he meets French ecologist Chloe Tousignant, who becomes both a scientific partner and, later, his wife.

As the book jumps from Africa to American suburbs, European cities and beyond, pets, zoo animals and wild creatures begin acting with eerie coordination. Packs of dogs overrun neighborhoods, apes and big cats break out of enclosures, and every incident is a little more organized and relentless than the last. Governments scramble to respond, but no familiar form of disaster planning quite fits what is happening.

Oz and a small circle of scientists piece together a theory that links the aggression to human technology and pollution. Constant wireless signals and heavy use of petroleum products seem to have altered animal pheromones and, in turn, the parts of the brain that control fear and violence. The result is not a single mastermind or virus, but the planet pushing back in the only way it can.

The novel keeps the chapters short and the action big, moving from firefights in zoos to tense scenes in war rooms and research labs. It is less interested in lab coat detail than in the cinematic image of cities emptying while the natural world surges in, which makes it easy to picture why the book was later adapted into a television series.

Readers can treat Zoo as a one off disaster story, or follow into the sequel novella and the graphic novel adaptation, which retell and extend Jackson Oz’s race to understand the attacks. Either way, it is a natural pick for anyone who likes apocalyptic thrillers with a science flavored hook.