Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World
By Stephen S. Hall
Grand Central Publishing | 2025 | 416 pages
Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat
By Joe Shute
Bloomsbury Wildlife | 2026 | 272 pages
Snakes—are there any creatures more widely reviled but so deeply embedded in our collective imagination? In Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World (Grand Central Publishing, 2025), Stephen S. Hall explores our complex relationship with these animals. Revered by ancient cultures and vilified by modern religions, snakes continue to exert a hold on us. Hall describes how we are drawn to salacious tales about the reptiles, “grisly stories… [that] find a home in the popular imagination because they ride that razor-thin, morbid but irresistible line between dread and fascination.”
Rats, too, reside in the dark recesses of our mind. As Joe Shute writes in Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2026), “[w]e are obsessed as a society with the notion of rats mustering in the gloom and waiting to invade our lives.” Snakes repel us by their foreignness––their legless locomotion, their behavior, their cold-bloodedness. “When it comes to vertebrates, no class of creatures is more different, more abhorrently Other, than snakes,” Hall writes. Rats, on the other hand, disgust and terrify us by their proximity. Shute describes them as “the ultimate transgressors, slipping between and gnawing through human-defined boundaries and borders.” They chew through our walls, burrow under our hen houses, and occasionally pop up in our toilets.
Through eye-opening and often entertaining discussions that delve into biology, ecology, animal behavior, and human history, Hall and Shute offer new perspectives on these animals—both remarkable creatures that deserve our reconsideration.
Although Slither is densely packed with information, the author’s vivid prose and spirited storytelling make this a deeply engaging book. The narrative benefits, as well, from the author’s idiosyncratic approach to each of his topics. Hall opens a chapter on snake venom with a woman’s dramatic account of what happened after she inadvertently stepped on a southern Pacific rattlesnake. Immediately, she feels “off the charts” pain, followed by a “grotesque, agonizing vibration” that spreads from her lips to her mouth, then moves through her face, neck, and body. Her head droops and she starts “drooling uncontrollably.” Arriving at a nearby fire station some five minutes after being bitten, she’s already in the early stages of respiratory failure.
“In the world of toxic mixology, there’s nothing quite like the cocktail of potent bioactive ingredients that snakes cook up in their venom glands,” Hall writes. A single dose of venom, he explains, may contain 100 or more different toxins. Here, as in his discussion of snake sex, Hall quickly dispels the misperception that these are uncomplicated animals.
The narrative takes us into molecular laboratories where scientists explore how boa constrictors, which may eat only once a year, digest meals slightly more than one-and-a-half times their own weight. (Imagine, for a moment, a 150-pound human sitting down to a 225-pound hamburger.) Pythons have evolved to do just this: on cue, a snake’s internal organs undergo an enormous growth spurt, its blood thickens, and its intestine, typically a “tiny, flaccid little tube… [transforms] into an immense, fluffy organ that [looks] like a rolled-up shag carpet.” What scientists have learned from these astounding metabolic adaptations, Hall explains, may have implications for human medicine, particularly in tissue regeneration and the treatment of diabetes.
The author’s discussion of sensory abilities focuses on the pit vipers, whose extraordinarily sensitive pit organs enable them to create a thermal image of their environment. Hall takes us inside the National Natural Toxins Research Center, where scientists remove the pit organs of western diamondback rattlesnakes. The author writes almost lovingly of these tiny, fleshy divots, which are located on either side of the snake’s snout: each is “a gossamer circlet of tissue, invisibly pimpled with thousands of exposed nerve endings that are hot-wired to the rattlesnake brain.” He continues: “You might think that dissecting the disembodied head of a dead pit viper would be relatively straightforward (if grueling) work. You would be wrong…. Every time they touched the detached head of a euthanized snake, it jumped.” These animals, he reminds us, can be deadly even when they’re no longer alive.
Slither is enriched by memorable tales of scientists, enthusiasts, and curators who feel compelled to work with these animals. The author tells of Harry Greene, a herpetologist, and David Hardy, a physician, who pioneered the use of radio telemetry to track black-tailed rattlesnakes in the wild for 15 years. Because the technology was relatively new, the two men had to grease up the radio transmitters and insert them manually, using forceps, down the gullets of the unanesthetized snakes. What Greene and Hardy observed—maternal care and protection, courtship, even individual personalities—upended prevailing notions of snake behavior. Hall writes admiringly of Raymond Ditmars, “easily the most influential (not to say beloved) herpetologist of the early 20th century,” whose feats include “[strapping] a caged king cobra to the hood of his car and [driving] around in freezing weather for 15 miles to anesthetize the ailing animal before treating an eye infection.”
If herpetologists are bold thinkers with a decidedly eccentric bent, the characters depicted in Stowaway—those whose livelihoods involve rats—are no less colorful. Shute writes of Jack Black, Victorian England’s legendary rat-catcher who was “famous for being able to plunge his hand into a cage full of live rats and emerge unscathed.” The author also describes the notorious rat pits of 19th-century London, where dogs were thrown into a circular pit with a pack of rats to see how many they could kill. “[Such] was the thirst for blood sport,” Shute writes, that rats—in a town notoriously overrun with them—were bred specifically for use in these events. As the author suggests, the spectacle showcased both the ferocity of the rodents and the cruelty of humans.
Shute is an unassuming and likeable narrator who admits to having had a personal aversion to rats when he began research for the book. “For much of my life,” he writes, “rats have made my skin crawl.” With encouragement from his wife, he purchases two rat pups from a breeder. In what becomes a delightful narrative thread, Shute describes how the sweet, inquisitive dispositions of these young rats, Molly and Ermintrude, win him over. He tells of them “[scuttling] up to us for tickles” and learning to bob for frozen peas in a ramekin of water. Shute dedicates the book to these beloved animals, “my friends among rogues.”
Rather than examining the intricacies of rat biology, the author highlights those qualities that make the rat supremely capable. While most rodents have incisors for gnawing, or back molars for chewing, the rat has both. This, Shute writes, provides the “versatility… [that] has enabled it to so successfully conquer the world.” The rat also boasts a “shockingly powerful bite… more powerful (relative to body weight) than a hyena, grizzly bear, bull shark, or hippopotamus….”
Refusing to sugar-coat the animal’s destructive abilities, Shute writes: “It would, in fact, be difficult to envisage a more effective harbinger of pestilence than the rat: muscular, ferocious, with incisors that are stronger than steel and bodies capable of squeezing though the tiniest of gaps to access food sources in our homes.” He cites the World Health Organization, which estimates that rats cause some 400 million infections in humans each year “through bites, the fleas they transport, urine, and their breath.” Bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, leptospirosis, cowpox, and hantavirus are just some of the diseases they spread. As for the rodent’s reputed savagery, Shute recounts chilling tales that are impossible to shake from one’s mind: in one, a Canadian rat-catcher recalls how rats killed and devoured a puppy on the family farm.
But just as Hall refutes the notion that snakes are primitive, Shute argues that rats are not inherently despicable. They are, instead, a reflection of our worst inclinations and actions. The author writes: “Wherever humanity’s impact is greatest upon the earth and the filth and detritus of our own creation is at its most destructive, you will find rats, too. They show us what we have done.” It’s a theme he returns to throughout the book.
The author considers the suburb of Montfaucon, near Paris, which for centuries was infamous for its rat infestations. But the rats, Shute suggests, were simply a byproduct of Montfaucon’s horror. For centuries, it was home to the most infamous gallows and gibbet in France, a place where human bodies “were strung up in windows like horrifying department store mannequins,” he writes. Later, Montfaucon served as a dumping ground for human sewage. Even worse, it housed knackers’ yards where thousands of horses were slaughtered. Here, “[when] darkness fell, a nightmarish army of rats emerged to feed. In winter, when the corpses froze, the rats were known to burrow directly into the flesh and eat their way out from the inside.” Rats certainly feasted here. But it was humans, Shute reminds us, who created the horrific conditions that attracted them.
The author proves himself a genial and thought-provoking guide as he visits cities, towns, and villages throughout the world to study the intertwined history of rats and humans. As he travels further afield, Shute reflects more deeply on these relationships and his opinions sharpen.
In his hometown of Sheffield, England, Shute crawls through a network of subterranean tunnels—“[measuring] my breath against waves of rising panic”—to gain an urban rat’s perspective on the place. In Paris, he settles quietly on a bench along the Canal Saint-Martin and watches as the first rat—“a large, muscular specimen”—emerges from a burrow. “Under the lamplight its long tail forms a calligraphic flourish as the rat races unseen past the squabbling drunks and a young couple….” Here, as elsewhere, Shute shows himself to be a close observer of both rats and humans.
In the German town of Hamelin, the author watches a colorful reenactment of the Pied Piper legend and considers the historic origins of this tragic children’s tale. Back in England, he visits an organic farm and notes how effectively the raptor perches and owl nesting boxes, combined with the judicious use of spring-loaded traps, keep the rodents in check. No book about rats would be complete without a discussion of rodenticides. Shute describes the impact of these poisons on barn owls and other creatures and expresses grave concern about their overuse.
In a chapter both atmospheric and poignant, the author describes spending a night alone with the black rats of Inchholm Island, in the Firth of Forth. The ancestors of these rats, he explains, arrived when the island served as a mandatory quarantine stopover for merchant ships during the bubonic plague. A look at the island’s somewhat dark history inevitably leads him to consider serious questions about humans and our tendency to blame others—rats, in this instance—for havoc that we’ve created.
The author’s observations during a trip to Tanzania are particularly insightful. In areas where natural vegetation and native predators have been eliminated, rats are dangerously out of control: parents tell of the rodents crawling through the walls of their homes, spreading disease, eating stores of food, and biting sleeping children. But another village is home to an organization called Apopo. Here, African giant pouched rats are trained to sniff out diseases such as tuberculosis, locate earthquake survivors buried under rubble, and even detect landmines. Shute tells of one rat in particular, Magawa, who was honored with the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross for locating 39 landmines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance in Cambodia.
How much we miss, Shute suggests, when we view rats solely through a lens of eradication. In the case of snakes, the consequences of our prejudice are more serious. Snakes are in decline. But we are less likely to protect an animal, Hall writes, when we view it as vile and primitive. Both authors urge us to open our minds to the complexity and evolutionary brilliance of these animals. The message, especially today, is relevant.
Tucker Coombe writes about nature and conservation from Cincinnati, Ohio and Chatham, Massachusetts. In addition to reviews for Terrain.org, she has contributed to Brevity, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Header photo by Michael Schwarzenberger, courtesy Pixabay.
