The Strangers

Naomi Alderman, a British novelist, narrates a story that blends memoir with speculative fiction, interweaving her grief over her mother's death and years of pregnancy loss with the appearance of a new animal species. After her mother, Marion, an artist and illustrator, dies of an undetected stroke, Naomi installs outdoor cameras in Marion's garden to photograph foxes, hoping to give her father, a retired historian, something to occupy himself. One night the cameras capture an image of a fox baring its teeth at an unrecognizable creature with soft, graduated fur and a long, tube-like snout. Naomi posts the photograph online, and strangers across the UK quickly report similar sightings at dusk and dawn.

When a specimen is killed by a car, scientists find a temperate-climate mammal with waterproof fur, three clawed toes per foot, and a moist, trunk-like proboscis. The press names the creatures "mimmoths," despite their being unrelated to elephants. An abandoned burrow discovered in Staffordshire reveals elaborate construction: smoothed walls, papery chambers, droppings pods with a waste-eating fungus, and a large stepped chamber Naomi's father calls "a theatre." No inhabited burrow is found in the UK, and the mimmoths consistently evade traps.

Public debate polarizes quickly. When a young man attacks two mimmoths with lighter fluid outside a hardware store in Leeds, one of the mimmoths severs his Achilles tendon, then hisses at shop staff until they follow it to the injured man. Calls for a cull prove impractical. Meanwhile, the mimmoths' toilet fungus, trademarked PuriFun, breaks up fatbergs, giant blockages of congealed grease and waste, in London's sewers. Naomi's father, recovering from bowel cancer, grows visibly healthier, one of many unexplained health improvements across the UK never definitively linked to the mimmoths.

Woven through the mimmoth narrative is Naomi's account of her fraught relationship with Marion. After a traumatic birth that included an emergency Caesarean and severe postnatal depression, Marion became fixated on Naomi's weight, taking her to a slimming club at age six and monitoring every meal. Yet Marion was also devoted: She read to Naomi for hours, introduced her to ballet, art, and science fiction, encouraged her writing from the start, and never gave up on her education. Naomi holds these contradictions without resolving them.

At the inquest into Marion's death, a procedural affair in which the testifying doctor had not even treated her, Naomi interjects to say her mother was an artist and teacher who is much missed. No follow-up letter about lessons learned arrives from the hospital or coroner. That evening, sitting on a bench in her mother's garden in a state of emptied-out despair, Naomi is approached by a mimmoth with silver flecks around its eyes that touches her hand with its cool proboscis and nestles against her body as she sobs. The mimmoth pats her hand twice and leaves.

Naomi also recounts years of pregnancy loss: more than eight and fewer than fifteen miscarriages, many caused by rare chromosomal abnormalities. During one pregnancy past twenty weeks, she received a fatal diagnosis by phone while sitting for a portrait at her Oxford college. That photograph now hangs in Lincoln College. She acknowledges her accumulated grief has made her an unreliable narrator.

One October evening, Naomi follows a mimmoth to a cul-de-sac, where it vanishes under a trampoline. Crawling beneath it, she discovers a white, spongy fungal mass extending at least thirty feet in diameter; by the following night, it has completely vanished. A minor official at Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) named Ian Frinton contacts her, revealing that in areas where a mimmoth has been killed, the local birth rate drops dramatically. Naomi consults her friend Dr. Samuel Belmont, a public health expert, who warns that Frinton's data does not meet Koch's postulates, the criteria for establishing causation, and cautions against going public.

Globally, crop yields increase by nearly 20 percent due to new fungal threads in the soil, dubbed "miracle threads," saving an estimated million lives from famine. The mimmoths gradually become normalized. Yet a phenomenon called "mimmoth psychosis" emerges: People report seeing mimmoths everywhere and believe the creatures communicate with them. Naomi herself begins seeing mimmoths that no one around her appears to notice and worries she may be developing this condition.

A young man in New Jersey captures a live mimmoth and sells the car containing it to Danny, a man connected to organized crime, who livestreams the captive animal. The broadcast degrades into disturbing footage: static, a human figure with elongated limbs, the trunk briefly on fire, then roughly thirty mimmoths running past before the screen goes white. Danny is found unharmed, claiming he simply got bored and let the mimmoth go.

Frinton gives Naomi encrypted files on a USB drive. One document describes human-animal relationships through history, including a passage from a cow's perspective as it is led to slaughter. Another describes Zedern, a German alt-right community that cut itself off from miracle threads; its members became malnourished and paranoid, and an embedded intelligence operative sent a garbled final message before killing seven people, including a child. A photograph shows an underground room whose walls repeat: "They Are Much Smarter. Much Smarter Than Us." Frinton urges Naomi to help "bring them down," but she wants no part of it.

In Mexico, visiting her older writer friend J, Naomi watches more than a hundred mimmoths emerge from cracks in a mountain. J tells her the war between humans and mimmoths may already be over, and the mimmoths won, but are "much kinder than we would be."

Frinton breaks into Naomi's house, sleepless and traumatized. He describes a disastrous American military operation in which a radioactive charge combined with gene-forcing technology designed to render the mimmoths infertile was detonated at an inhabited mimmoth burrow in Arizona. Initial success gave way to chaos: Screens went dark, officials were found naked and crawling, and Frinton's own memories began being overwritten. He wants Naomi's help attacking the mimmoths again. Instead, she feeds him and lets him sleep.

That night, Naomi opens her patio door and the mimmoths enter. Purple fronds cover the floor and ceiling. A mimmoth curls on Frinton's chest, easing his breathing. Naomi's mimmoth, the one with silver flecks around its eyes, wraps around her shoulders and exhales through its proboscis. She breathes in and dimly perceives the mimmoths' view of reality: a world of "between-possibilities," where origins are irrelevant and beings appear when they are "possible enough." She sees her own life as a cloud of alternate selves, including ones where pregnancies succeeded. She watches Frinton fade into a gentler version of himself. A flood of childhood memories of Marion washes through her, and a golden light fades. The living room returns to normal. Frinton is gone.

In the months that follow, Naomi holds Marion's stone-setting, a Jewish ceremony at which the memorial headstone is unveiled. She makes Passover in her mother's kitchen, furious at Marion's blunt knives and deeply moved by the continuity of the practices Marion taught her. She reflects that what her mother made of the world was Naomi herself. Browsing an antiques shop with her father, she feels Marion's presence, and her imaginary child's too. The world on paper, she reflects, is where the dead, the living, and the never-born meet. She does not wish her ghosts away. In a few short years, she notes, she will publish a book about the mimmoths, and it will be taken for fiction.