Soho Press, 356 pages, hardcover, $20.31

A cat running around with a gun would be enough to spike a lot of people’s curiosity, but Robert Repino’s Mort(e) goes above and beyond full-blown science fiction weirdness to deliver a wonderfully engaging narrative about identity, humanity, memory, and the never-ending quest for something better. In the process, it also offers an intelligent deconstruction of religion and the military while showing the worst side of human nature with a clarity rarely found in the genre. The result is a unique novel that walks the line between Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World and George Orwell’s Animal Farm while breaking new ground and standing alone in the realm of contemporary science-fiction thrillers.

In Mort(e), the ants manage to grant all animals the same intellectual prowess as humans and the event leads to the “war with no name,” which has a single purpose: the extermination of the human race. Caught in the midst of chaos and dreaming of meeting his best friend again (a dog named Sheba) is the narrative’s main character: a former house cat turned war hero who adopts Mort(e) as a name after the change. Mort(e) makes a name for himself by accepting the riskiest missions and for fighting – and questioning – the only weapon the humans have left that actually scares the animals: a biological weapon known as EMSAH.

Despite his actions, the feline’s main goal is always finding his lost friend. As the years go by and the war with no name rages on, Mort(e) witnesses as animals adopt some of humanity’s worst traits, and his obsession with cracking the mystery about EMSAH leads him to discoveries he could never have imagined. Between his discoveries and a mysterious message saying Sheba is alive, Mort(e) finds himself at the center of not only an ongoing war, but also a strange prophecy. The journey he embarks on, and the decisions he makes along the way, have the potential to change everything that happened since the day animals became very intelligent being and started walking on two legs.

The preceding synopsis offers a glimpse at what the reader will find in the pages of Mort(e), but it falls short of explaining the wonderfully detailed and very rich narrative Repino has created. Between the story of the Colony, the group of ants responsible for starting the war and anthropomorphizing all beasts, and elements like an apparatus that translates all languages immediately and can help share accumulated knowledge, this novel truly takes advantage of the no-holds-barred nature of science-fiction and delivers a great mixture of action, humor, sadness, adventure, and violence. Then, as if being a smart, entertaining read was not enough, it goes further and hits the reader with a superb deconstruction of society’s relationships with religion, the importance of memory, an exploration of the meaning of loyalty, and a brutally honest glance at humans through the lens of those who share the planet with us.

By showing us humanity through the eyes of animals, Repino easily demonstrates how strange, petty, unnecessarily violent, and unintelligent we can be. Animals look on as the human capacity for hatred, bizarre beliefs, and basest desires take over, and the reader watches along with them. However, once it’s clear that animals are superior, they start acquiring/demonstrating some of the same traits. This mutation into a much more human version of themselves can bring about their doom, and that forces us to reconsider how much of what hurts humanity is our own fault and why.

Coming in at a hefty 356 pages, Mort(e) is the kind of genre-bending novel that packs a lifetime of events into a reduced space and somehow seems not to have lost anything in the process. Just for that it deserves to be called an epic narrative. Furthermore, while there are animals running around killing people with guns and the Queen of the Colony is like an unforgiving deity full of resentment, those elements are only the tip of the iceberg because Repino wrapped them in a tale about universal themes like love, morality, and what it means to be human.

Mort(e) is a novel that deserves to be read, and it signals the arrival of a voice that promises to deliver complex, intelligent, and compelling stories regardless of the genre he decides to tackle next.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.