In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Their brief, intense romance in San Francisco left behind no photos, and yet they'd never forgotten each other. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragically and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive prion illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and died just months after the move.

Tender, erotic, and damned, the nineteen stories in Animal Kingdom are inspired by Behr's grief. It explores desire and searches for meaning from chaos and loss. With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl's bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar. The stories share the theme that humans can't escape their primal urges and are intelligent animals in the flawed kingdom we all share.