This Goth Fox Predicted the Atom Bomb
Meditations on "A Black Fox Running" and how to engage with books.
Illustrations via antiqueanimals and Dansk Jävlarna.
My friend Zeke Kinclaith sent me A Black Fox Running in a box of books accompanied by a handwritten letter a few months ago. Getting a letter from a fellow author made me feel soooo authentic. As if, in 50 years, students reading our work in college literature courses will be surprised to know that we were friends, exchanging books and letters and crochet dolls, but never met in person, just like the pen pals of the literary scenes of old. Maybe they’ll even start handwriting letters for their own friends in order to also feel important and artistic.
Look, having a bit of an inflated ego is what keeps me standing up straight.
A Black Fox Running isn’t the type of book I would ordinarily gravitate to. I’m opposed on some basic level to the idea of animal characters communicating in human-style language.1 I’m kind of an anti-furry – the more a nonhuman character is humanized, the less I resonate with it. I’m even annoyed by depictions of the sun and moon with human faces. I come to literature to explore possibilities, to have my mind opened to different facets of thinking and being; I gravitate toward sci-fi and fantasy, and when I read contemporary novels, I most enjoy those that explore cultures and value sets completely different to mine. I don’t need or want to see myself in literature. I already know myself! The more a story is warped in order to be familiar to me, the less I enjoy reading it.
However, despite the fact that A Black Fox Running imposes some human cognitive structures on its animal characters – names, language, mythology – it is also so clearly, deeply in love with the inhuman.
The most prominent strength of this book is its language. It’s vivid and jarring, with a rhythm unlike any book I’ve read before. It’s anchored in physical detail; it wouldn’t be unreasonable to estimate that perhaps a third of the wordcount is devoted to digressions about the animals and plants outside of the main cast and how they fill the ecosystem.
Many of the plants and animal species featured in this tapestry are named, but not defined. There’s a steep learning curve at the beginning of this book where you have to pick up from context what some of the animals and plants actually are. Places, too, are not defined; I had to learn from context what a “tor” even was. There’s also the added challenge of figuring out how to read the human dialogue; the humans in the book speak in a phonetically-written regional dialect full of words I myself have never encountered. At first, they were unintelligible to me, but, over time, I learned to decipher the pattern and felt more immersed in the story for it.
I loved this.
I love when a book doesn’t hold my hand. I love when an author goes off on the journey they want to go on and never glances back to see if I’m keeping up. There are never digressions to compare area-specific species to more well-known examples, never moments to define words, never orienting paragraphs telling me when or in what political situation this story takes place. All of this information is conveyed within the pulse of the story. I’m given no breaks, left no option but to be swept along, folded into this living world which the author so clearly adores.
I’ll give you an example to show you what I mean. These are just a random few paragraphs from the opening of a chapter at the beginning of the book:
Dartmoor lay hushed beneath a sky overspread with banks of numbus cloud. Thunder raced in a cracking boom from Hay Tor to Longford Tor, again and again. Sheep and ponies stood with bowed heads as the rain fell in great heavy drops, battering the heather and bracken. Spray danced around the birches and rowans, leaves were torn off, grass and flowers were flattened. In black columns the rain exploded on the surface of the roads, and the Becca Brook swelled, running white-clawed among the boulders and the colour of cider and ale along its deeper reaches.
By mid-morning the storm had passed. A multitude of scents rose from the earth, the sun shone, the road steamed. The dark masses of bracken glittered, and rivers ran fat and silent, their waters clouded with silt and dead leaves. Daws came to bathe at Dead Dog Pond, jumping into deep water, jacking continuously in the playful manner of their kind. Wulfgar watched them and thought of food.
The prose itself follows hardly any of the accepted wisdom. It’s full of “is” and “was”. Same-length sentences often march at you one after another, unrelenting and detached. It’s choppy, sometimes, jarring in its rhythm. The word-choice is weird. Yet I loved it too. I loved it as the hounds “bugled,” the eels were “moon-slick”. It’s visceral, metaphor-layered, gory.
Here, look, one of the bloodiest paragraphs to contrast with the excerpt above. This is a battlefield flashback:
His ruined knee poked from his trousers like a scavenger’s tit-bit, something for the foxes to gnaw at. Another flare plopped down and he saw all around him the bulging dead. His lung heaved and he siphoned up a warm gruel of blood and phlegm. The sniper’s bullet had done disgusting things to Burdett’s head.
I mean, eugh, right? The language throughout the book gets its hands in your guts and twists.
Although the story of A Black Fox Running is gestated in the lives of animals, it is not, I think, chiefly concerned with the nature of animals. It doesn’t explore nonhuman cognition in a real sense; the differing value systems that the animal characters express, nominally related to their biological predispositions, are merely hyperbolized versions of human ideologies. This was a tough pill for me to swallow, as I said. However, I came to realize that, as in all good genre fiction, the hyperbole here is a tool to dissect the real.
The two central matters which with this book concerns itself are, instead, the places of man and God. I say places: What is man’s place within his world? What is God’s place within man? What is this place, too, that we occupy – what lives in it, what makes it up?
The animals in A Black Fox Running seem to represent facets of man and, perhaps more prominently, serve as an outside perspective through which to examine man’s nature. As much as is possible, I mean. When it comes to human nature, we’re all flies in glass bottles, unable to truly see the whole of what contains us. To abstract it for a minute, A Black Fox Running is a story written by a fly in a bottle about a bottle watching the fly it holds. The bottle is nature, the wild, the world; the fly is a hunter named Scoble, and he’s gross, and he sucks, and he’s one of the most tragic characters I’ve ever experienced in literature.
A quick aside: I’ve often wondered what the point is of a positive book review. Negative ones are easy. I read this book so you don’t have to, and now I’ll tell you how and why it went wrong. I’ve written some of these. They’re entertaining for both the reader and the author, and they can also be educational. I’ll admit that some of my first engagement with literary criticism outside of school was in watching long YouTube video essays enumerating the flaws of books I’d never read, movies I’d never watched, and videogames I had no intention to play. And, eventually, I incorporated a lot of the ideas I discovered there into my own creative work. Peeling back the skin of a particularly bad story and pointing out all the flaws is a great way to teach someone how stories work. Eventually, this no longer suffices as creative education, and the student has to start looking for good examples to emulate, rather than bad examples to avoid (A Black Fox Running is one of those brain-stretching good examples).
However, once you actually start recommending a book, telling someone to actually seek it out rather than to avoid it, the question of spoilers comes into play. Now, this is a tricky subject, and I think my opinion on it differs from the mainstream one. Many people covet the unspoiled experience of a story, and I understand that. However, there have been multiple times in my life where the only reason I approached a story in the first place was because I stumbled upon a massive spoiler and thought hey, that sounds awesome, I’ll check it out! (this was the case with my favorite show, Black Sails, and one of my favorite books, Monstrous Regiment). Often, it’s knowing that there will be a big payoff to come that keeps me engaged with a work. It also helps to keep my attention when someone has already highlighted certain strengths of the book to me before I read — for instance, “the prose-style emphasizes the role of the environment in a really interesting way” or “I’m obsessed with this character.” That way, I know it’s worth continuing to invest my time and attention (I’ve been burned many times before).
Additionally, I think the best stories are able to hold up to multiple readings — ie, that they have more to offer as a whole even when the reader knows the linear events of the plot.2 Essentially, spoilers aren’t a major concern for me unless they make me think things are going to turn out shittily on a craft level,3 in which case I’m less likely to open the book at all.
All this to say — my intention is to discuss A Black Fox Running in full. If you don’t want to know what happens, get outta here. If knowing the events of the book might, instead, intrigue you enough to read it, then read on!
In the beginning, all of the characters in A Black Fox Running seem archetypal. We have the typical fairytale cast: the god-chosen hero, the wisened seer, the hero’s love, the villain. At first glance, Scoble is so unilaterally evil as to be boring. He’s the hunter in every animal story: he’s the farmers in Fantastic Mr. Fox, Bambi’s Man. However, while the animal characters largely retain their mythic auras, Scoble, over the course of the story, deepens and realizes, becomes a part of a concrete modernity. Through his interactions with other human characters, we slowly begin to see the web that surrounds him, a web of classism, xenophobia, religion, and PTSD.
The tragedy of Scoble builds like a wave, and you only realize it’ll drown you once it’s already cresting over your head. Key character details are revealed in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sentences. For example, in passing gossip between his fellow hunters:
‘I expect it’s his didakai blood,’ said Yabsley, hitching up his overalls.
The Luggs waited to see if he was serious.
‘I idn leg-pullin’, boys. His old mum got put in the family way by a gypo. I suppose her did more than cross his palm with silver.’
‘Her should’ve crossed her legs,’ George said and Yabsley grinned.
‘Leonard’s late,’ said Farmer Lugg.
This is the only time Scoble’s family history is ever mentioned in the book, except for a brief memory, later, of his father beating him bloody.
The POV is split between Wulfgar, the titular black fox, and Scoble, the hunter. Though it remains a loosely-omniscient third-person, it hews closer and closer to Scoble’s psyche as the story nears its end, eventually even inhabiting his hallucinations as if they are layered within the real world. His PTSD from his time as a private in WWII takes a place of special importance in the latter half of the book. As his health declines and his obsession with killing Wulfgar consumes him, it becomes more and more clear Scoble never left the war. Neither does A Black Fox Running itself. As it treats with the weeping wounds of WWII, it looks, also, to the future: what war will be, what humanity’s fate will be, after its publication in 1981.
While Scoble writhes in the past, the fox Wulfgar has visions of the future. He sees himself leading the fox clan away from their home. His mentor, Stargrief, has a vision of development expanding across the countryside, and then a bomb falling on his hills:
Now Stargrief was a spirit like the wind, gliding over the familiar moorland. Everything had changed. The towns were many, the houses were tall and roads ran wide and long where the fields had been. Only there weren’t any people or cars. Under the Great Tor huddled the cattle, sheep and ponies. No foxes, he thought idly. Then a vast, blinding light filled the sky and all the towns were burning and the mushroom cloud was billowing up. And the darkness swept in on a mighty wind, heavy with the reek of death.
At first A Black Fox Running seems to be a small, naturalistic story about animals in the isolated countryside. But it forces you to confront the fact that there is no isolated countryside, no story or space unmoved by the currents of humanity’s wars. It deals on its face with the trauma of World War II, but it was published in 1981. The prospect of mankind’s senseless annihilation of ourself and our fellow living things is the weight hanging over every page, every line about foxes’ visions and destiny and unpreventable death. It is undeniably a Cold War book.
I struggle to summarize or reflect upon the religious face of this book. It’s not something I can just tell you about – it’s something you come to understand as you read, as the narrative moves you from simple noble mythologies to blood and annihilation and then to the realization that they are one and the same. It’s the resolution of a blurred picture into sense the longer you stare at it, the longer you turn it in your hands. It’s the slow revelation of immensity.
Scoble’s relationship with religion is fraught. “Church is just another house,” he says. “There’s more of God in my garden than you’ll find in Buckfast Abbey.” He distances his own God from the God of organized religion – personally, I read this through the lens of class – yet also sets his God in opposition to nature. Over time he comes to believe that Wulfgar, the titular black fox, is the Devil. His holy struggle is, then, the struggle of a man to dominate the wild.
Ahab chases the white whale.4 Scoble chases the black fox. What exactly does a man chase, when he’s chasing an animal? It could be nature itself. It could be truth. It could be God wearing the animal’s face, or the Devil. Whatever it is, it’s something he cannot know, cannot touch, that will not speak to him – he seeks to capture it, and it consumes him instead. This is always inevitable.
There’s a sense, here, that every creature follows a set track to its end, and that this track goes deeper than individual choice. The whole of nature, of context and instinct and the cycles of life, not “choice,” is what brings characters to their ends. We are reminded that individual choice and natural process are not separate things.
As much as this book portrays humans as part of nature, it is concerned, too, with the unnatural. The destruction of the tor, human expansion, war, which ripped Scoble from his home and from himself – these are the sources of the wounds that bleed hot into the ecological tapestry. There is no sense, though, that men are truly the masters of nature, or that we dictate what occurs.
There’s even a well-meaning liberal stand-in, a wealthy naturalist who appreciates the tor’s ecosystem and wins the support of a young boy growing up wild. In the end, he is utterly inconsequential. He’s not present for the final bloody confrontation in the snow, offers no final word on the narrative. He’s present, as the crows and the grasses are present, as a part of things, but not an arbiter. Humans’ authority over nature is not taken seriously.
To the naked eye, this is still a fundamentally simple story. It’s about a fox outsmarting a hateful hunter. It is not concerned with proving itself to be greater than that. It does not position itself above convention, but rather asserts there is deeper meaning to be found within simplicity. The familiar hills are really an intricate web of life, blood, and spirit. The man is a man, and all that entails. The familiar structure means this story can wind its way into so many rich, unforeseen places.
Perhaps the crowning example is how the rivalry between Wulfgar and Scoble ends. Wulfgar himself doesn’t kill Scoble. He doesn’t even particularly “outsmart” Scoble. Scoble dies because he is chasing Wulfgar, and he runs out into the cold while ill and delusional and falls off a cliff and freezes. In a different story Wulfgar might have lured him into a trap. He might have bitten his throat out. He doesn’t. There isn’t any simple catharsis. It happens, and then it’s done.
This is a beautiful book, and I’m immensely glad to have read it. But, as I also must address in a comprehensive review, there was a significant mark on my experience.
Since I finished Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations,5 I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to read in a female body. There’s a cognitive dissonance that comes with connecting deeply to philosophical, spiritual, and fictional writings that describe the human spirit while being periodically reminded that, in the logic of these works, one is not fully human.
I’m lifting weights, listening to my buddy Marcus talk about judgement, decency, the place of mankind in the universe. I nod and think, my God, he’s talking to me. He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking, putting my own unspoken musings to words, to reality. My mind is connected to thousands of years of the tradition of human thought and wrestling with the divine. I put the weights down, look up. A 20-something young woman looks back at me from the gym mirror. In my ear, Marcus says how glad he was that in his youth he resisted the urge to rape his slaves. Gee, Marcus, I guess I’m glad about that too. He says, “Consider the deformity of these characters, [...]the effeminate, the savage, the beastly, the childish, the foolish, the crafty, the buffoonish, the faithless, the tyrannical.”6 I consider it.
I go on to read The Odyssey and The Illiad. I get invested in characters that periodically squabble about the women they’ve taken as war prizes.
I open a random short story submitted to a fantasy fiction contest on Substack about a warlord raising the son of his enemy. The man’s going against tradition by not killing the child, and he’s venerated for it in the narrative. A passing sentence mentions his bedslaves.
In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, I don’t resent this. I understand the context in which these stories written. I will not cancel Marcus fucking Aurelius, but nor will I ignore ideas in his work because they are inconvenient. I understand and interpret them as part of the whole.
So please don’t lecture me about all writers being “of their time.” Consider, instead, the simple and horrifying truth that every woman, and every slave, through all of history, has been exactly as human as you and I. They have been exactly as capable of intelligence, honor, strength, and creativity as any person in the modern era. No matter how “of their time” a writer was, this has always been true. Always. It is a difficult fact to comprehend, because comprehending it opens a vast pit beneath your feet into which you must fall, a pit of suffering — suffering, that is, of intellect, of creativity, of philosophical principle — on a scale you are not equipped to comprehend. But it must be comprehended. It is a logical truth. Because the best evidence available to me is my own experience, and I know that I am a woman, and I am human.
I think that the great strength of womanhood is that it never, ever allows you to take any statement at face value.
Anyway. There are no female fox characters in A Black Fox Running besides those Wulfgar takes as mates. Though he loves them, these vixens are weights to him. When his cubs are born, Wulfgar resents the fact that his mate prioritizes them. This section of the book was the most difficult to get through, for me, because it felt so stifling. Wulfgar struggles and snaps because he is chained to domesticity and no longer free. It is the vixen that keeps him there.
All of the important foxes in the fox clan’s mythology are male. “Dog-foxes” (males) will make the future. Vixens are auxiliary to this story, auxiliary to spirituality as discussed. At best, they’re wives, and at worst, they’re scenery.
It’s odd, because A Black Fox Running tends to walk this deliberate line of balancing animal instinct with imagined human value systems. There’s a juxtaposition of what’s natural and what’s beyond natural, and interesting points are made in that tension, like notes humming from a plucked string. But there’s no tension, here, with this. The human idea of the relationship between man and woman is simply replicated in the foxes, and in the otters, and in the birds. As if these roles are simple nature.
I found it alienating. Particularly throughout the first half of the book, I had periodic Meditations-in-the-gym-mirror moments, where through all the castles of spiritual and natural wonder being built around me, I was punted back into my own body with the realization that this is not about me. This is not for me. I am not a player in this. I am not the intended partner in this conversation. My engagement with these ideas on equal terms is explicitly precluded.
Because I am objectively aware, by my placement within my own consciousness, that women are capable of ambition, intelligence, and spiritual depth, such a large blind spot tends to call into question everything else that a work, fictional or otherwise, is trying to say about human nature or the natural way things are. If someone starts their treatise on meteorology by saying that the sky is green, one would naturally have some doubts about what follows.
It honestly almost made me put the book down. It is quite a prevalent issue in the first half. But I trusted Zeke’s recommendation, and I am glad I powered through. The latter half of the book mostly leaves the annoying stuff behind (mostly because there is less female presence overall, as unfortunate as that is). It also brings a lot of the dark and the philosophical aspects of the book to a gripping, gothic crescendo.
A Black Fox Running revels in the strangeness and viscerality of nature. It revels in wholeness. It wraps up in a twisty blend of human and nonhuman, reality and dream-vision, to explore in a refractive light ideas of death, fate, and the nature of God.
I still wholeheartedly recommend this book. I’m forced to be clear-eyed about my position in relation to it, but, on the whole, I gained a lot from reading it. It has been solidified as an entry in the canon of my mind; I will continue to think about it and be inspired by it for the rest of my life.
For more discussion of gothic literature, read my recent essay on Wuthering Heights and the travesty of White Heathcliff:
…Or, if you’re in the mood to be a hater, check out my personal newsletter, where so far I’ve mostly been bitching about the “feminist retelling” genre.
Despite my childhood obsession with Warrior Cats. And, speaking of, if the Erins Hunter weren’t majorly inspired by A Black Fox Running in writing that series, I’ll eat my hat.
I chose to start my novel by announcing the future decapitation of my main character.
Hence why I do not intend to watch Game of Thrones despite at this point being deep into the ASOIAF books.
I have a complicated relationship with Moby Dick. Someday I’ll polish up my crazed journal ramblings about it and post them as an essay here.
And, since then, done a lot more reading into Stoic philosophy and the history of Ancient Rome.
I may write a longer piece on this soon.