The first two stories in this collection had me thinking that this was going to be my new favourite short story collection. In In Kind, a trans man wants to conceive a child by himself, in the process reuniting with his estranged mother, while in Rock Jenny, in a world where people declare their own genders at 11, Jenny is someone who yearns for something greater than the gender binary. These two stories were art, seriously.

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The other stories that followed weren’t bad by any means, but they didn’t live up to the ridiculously high standards set by those first two stories. As the title of the collection suggests, all stories explore transition, gender, and the natural world in one way or another. They’re strange and sad, hopeful and bizarre. I did also really like Congregation, which features a group of gender-bending nuns who spend part of the year as a woman, before morphing into men for the other half. But this story felt jumbled, as there was also a subplot which drew parallels to Canadian residential schools, and I had no clue how the two concepts were supposed to come together.

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The collection did end on a high with another 10/10 story though - it’s the titular story, and follows a trans man who has been left a bizarre ‘museum’ by an uncle he never really connected with. Travelling to see his inheritance, he realises the town has succumbed to a strange disease causing eerie transformations.

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The writing overall was very much my vibe, and despite some of the stories not managing to live up to others, it’s still a solid collection. Will be looking out for what Angus publishes next!