The Zoo Is A Terrifying Place In 'Fierce Kingdom'
Gin Phillips' new novel — which follows a young mother trying to keep her child safe during a mass shooting at a zoo — explores the way violence can be a safe abstraction for kids, or cruelly real.
It's hard to imagine how a scene of a mother buying her child crackers from a vending machine could be one of the more terrifying things in contemporary fiction. But that is the case with Gin Phillips' Fierce Kingdom, in which shooters take over a zoo at dusk, forcing those left behind to hide or be picked off along with the penned-in animals.
Caught up in the terror are three
