Midnight in the Zoological Gardens

David Ryan’s short story collection, Alligator (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025), is filled with poetic, trippy, magical realist stories tied together not in theme but in tone. Ryan’s characters feel dark and surreal, barbaric and degenerate, often toeing the line between this world and another. It reads, to me, like a Roald Dahl book all grown up. The collection, as a whole, is extremely readable and each story feels like a carefully hand-picked jewel. It’s glittery and lush, and all together, these pieces toy with the idea of human consciousness. While I’d like to say something about all of them, for the purposes of this review, I’m going to focus on one of my favorites from the collection, “The Zoological Gardens.”