One of your central concerns throughout Filthy Animals seems to be how quickly tenderness and sexual desire can slip into violence. I don't know what my life will look like once I'm over this hump, but I know that at least I'll be able to read. Like once I got back to being able to read I was like okay, I can survive this. But the big thing that really got me over the hump was getting back to being able to read, because when I'm not reading, I'm so miserable. I watched a lot of Gilmore Girls, I caught up on all of the white people TV that my friends have been talking about for years that I never watched. And so it was just a long incredibly boring, incredibly difficult slog. And then the next day, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed or I would feel so anxious my heart rate would be like 140. There were some days I was like, oh, I'm totally better. With the panic disorder, there was nothing for that except to just slowly realize that I was not in any great danger.

Like Taylor’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Real Life, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and is currently being adapted into a movie with Kid Cudi, Filthy Animals takes a queer Black graduate student in the Midwest as its central protagonist. Throughout Filthy Animals, Taylor fixes his gaze on similar moments of peril, probing the tension between vulnerability and deception, sexual desire and violence, with an elegant precision teetering on the gothic. “It was that perilous moment when you decide that you're going to turn on cam and you never know who's on the other side- if it's gonna be some old white man in a basement in Indiana pretending to be a teenager.” Behind him, a giant stack of boxes sits in a corner of his Iowa City apartment, which contains nearly four hundred recently signed copies of Filthy Animals, his short story collection published by Riverhead on June 22. “This takes me back to the olden days of Yahoo chat rooms,” says Brandon Taylor, moments after his face appears on my screen. It’s one of the first questions in the age of the Zoom interview: camera on?

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor