Susan’s negative sense of herself persists to the very end of the novel. What’s more, she sees her infidelity as directly responsible for her husband’s death: “The loneliness swelled, guilt pulsing at the base. She was a murderer. She took a deep breath. Murderer, murderer.”Her self-condemnation is so persistent that at one point I found myself thinking: “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Susan. Affairs hurt, but they don’t kill people.”

With the help of the silent oddness of the house, though, she comes to make a kind of peace with her behavior. In fact, the novel’s most notable accomplishment is the strangeness and beauty of this haunting menagerie. It underlines Susan’s gradual metamorphosis and allows Millet to explore the fetishization of the animal world. “She did not know,” Millet writes, “why the common raccoons of the great room kept company with the foxes, the possums, which were apparently marsupials, or the beavers, classified as semi-aquatic rodents. . . . Because without order there could be no true collecting. Without order there was only acquisition.”

I wanted to love this book because of its willingness to be strange, but I couldn’t give myself over to it entirely. The language is never less than skillful, and the images striking and inventive. But I found the characters oddly lacking in flesh and blood, especially in a novel full of animal flesh. And the parts never cohered into a narrative that compelled me forward. To some extent, the story mirrors the stasis of the animals in the house Susan inherits. It’s weirdly fascinating, yet remote.

Southgate is the author of four novels, most recently “The Taste of Salt.”