Compellingly horrific …

… Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips review – terror at the zoo | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Fierce Kingdom is the Alabama writer Gin Phillips’s fifth novel, her imagining of how a mother would react in this blackest of nightmares. It is panic-inducingly gripping as Joan dashes in her flip-flops for a hiding place while negotiating the questions and concerns of a four-year-old. “She can imagine clamping a hand over his mouth, holding him tight, ordering him to be perfectly still and perfectly quiet. She desperately wants that, but she cannot imagine a scenario where it is possible. If she scared him badly enough for him to stop talking, he would probably start sobbing.”