The Fine Line between Predator and Prey

Sometimes in this life we find we are the predators, sometimes we are the prey. And sometimes we actually convince ourselves that we can negotiate the difference—that we can stick our heads into a reeking mouth and then pull back a hair’s breadth ahead of the teeth, just in time to cheat the jaws. It is the borderlines among all these states of being, the catalysts that shift us from predator to prey, that are the subject of Lisa Moore’s new novel, Alligator.

The novel is Moore’s first, but it is as risky, startling and technically skilled as her Giller Prize–nominated story collection, Open, and on its first page it signals its willingness not to turn its head away from viciousness and violence.

A teenaged girl is sitting in her Aunt Madeleine’s apartment in St. John’s, Newfoundland, watching an industrial safety film made by her aunt, which features a man who sticks his head into alligators’ mouths for a living. It was hot the day that...