Around 1733, a former manservant to a president of London’s Royal Society sold his hand-illustrated compendium, A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births, to the Society’s current president; one memorable entry was titled “A Wild and Hairy Irishman.” Fifty years later, a Scottish surgeon and anatomist harvested the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, which was displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons of England until 2023.

Since classical antiquity, Western travelers, geographers, and naturalists have often described atypical individuals—and distant peoples, real and imagined—as monsters. Medieval maps depicted giants, human-animal hybrids, and figures gnawing on human limbs inhabiting the edge of the world, where harsh climates supposedly gave rise to brutish species. Centuries later, when explorers and colonial administrators wielded European science to serve empire building, perceptions of the Irish paralleled earlier commentators’ descriptions of “wild” and “monstrous” peoples.

Around 1733, a former manservant to a president of London’s Royal Society sold his hand-illustrated compendium, A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births, to the Society’s current president; one memorable entry was titled “A Wild and Hairy Irishman.” Fifty years later, a Scottish surgeon and anatomist harvested the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, which was displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons of England until 2023.

Since classical antiquity, Western travelers, geographers, and naturalists have often described atypical individuals—and distant peoples, real and imagined—as monsters. Medieval maps depicted giants, human-animal hybrids, and figures gnawing on human limbs inhabiting the edge of the world, where harsh climates supposedly gave rise to brutish species. Centuries later, when explorers and colonial administrators wielded European science to serve empire building, perceptions of the Irish paralleled earlier commentators’ descriptions of “wild” and “monstrous” peoples.

Field Notes from an Extinction: A Novel, Eoghan Walls, Seven Stories Press, 272 pp., $19.95, March 2026

Derry-born poet and creative writing lecturer Eoghan Walls evokes such monster-making narratives in his second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction. Set in 1847 during the Great Famine, the story follows English ornithologist Ignatius Green on a quest to study the world’s last colony of great auks—or garefowl—on Tor Mor, an uninhabited rock off the coast of the Irish island of Inishtrahull. The novel unfolds through Green’s field notebook, in which he depicts Irish people as freakish, grotesque, and animal-like.

Walls has crafted an immersive, unsettling meditation on morality and monstrification, or the act of denying the humanity of individuals or groups. In contrasting Green’s empathy for the auks with his lack of any similar sentiment for the colonized Irish, the novel illuminates how ostensibly objective scientific language and analytical frameworks can narrow the parameters of who is considered worthy of compassion.

The novel’s central plot begins when the residents of Inishtrahull upend Green’s plans to study the auks. Instead of........

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