Spiracle Audiobook: The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing — Joseph Fasano

In this debut novel from prize-winning poet Joseph Fasano, the personal apocalypse of the death of a loved one frames the story. Following the death of his wife, Fasano’s unnamed narrator takes his young son on a trip to hunt a mountain lion. The narrator loves the wild and respects the non-human world. But when the hunting trip goes wrong in the worst way possible and his hunting turns into revenge, he has to enter the ‘dark heart of every wild thing’ to learn what he doesn’t yet know. His time in the mountains alongside flashbacks lovingly recreating the life of his family reshape language as it tries to speak the unspeakable – love, grief, the world of nature.

In William Hope’s reading, this velvet tumble of language is powerfully entwined with the novel’s and nature’s dark heart.