North Carolina author Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s experimental debut collection of stories and musings “Little Ones” centers on the experiences of animals, children and other beings that life seems to have forgotten or passed over. Employing a sardonic yet introspective tone, LaJoie (pronouns they/them) — who humorously describes themself in one autobiographical story as “overly sensitive” but also “incapable of engaging directly with (their) emotions” — gives voice to those who can’t speak, be it a snake, a piece of steak or a road-killed raccoon.

Form is up for grabs in this Southern gothic collection of 21 unique works that uses graphic ephemera to round out LaJoie’s storytelling. The collection opens with a reader’s survey containing 18 questions and includes more than a few comic strips, drawings and pages ripped from a pamphlet. It concludes with LaJoie’s fictional Wikipedia page in a piece aptly titled “Wiki.”

If the final work is autobiographical, “Wiki” explains the inspiration behind the 20 previous stories, told with an undercurrent of humor breaking through the oozing malcontent. Achievement is not the focus of LaJoie’s Wiki article that is speckled with citations that do not exist. The page omits the MFA they hold from the University of Alabama. It fails to reference the 2023 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories award LaJoie won for this collection’s second tale, “The Locksmith.”

Instead, LaJoie’s Wikipedia page describes a childhood fraught with unexpressed confusion. It starts with a pants-wetting episode in kindergarten, something that happens because “they were incapable of differentiating between the symbols for GIRLS and BOYS when they went to use the restrooms.”

The page proceeds to reveal father who was hyper-focused on masculinity, manifesting in LaJoie a stressed-out child who became obsessed with “chewing upon their own shirtsleeve.” After detailing a handful of painful years struggling to fit in, the page finishes by highlighting the associate degree it took LaJoie four years to complete at a technical college. Clearly, LaJoie is not trying to sing their own praises.

In “Snek & Goose,” a goose is telling his snake friend about a boy named Grey. Grey’s brother has served time in prison, a place “humans put each other when they’re not wanted” administered through a strange concept to Snek called time.

Learning that in real life LaJoie is a creative-writing teacher with the Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project leaves one pondering if the job influenced the story, or if LaJoie’s life influenced the job. Either way, at the narrative’s conclusion, Goose is overwhelmingly glad to not be human.

The natural world’s relationship with the human condition is a theme that ties these stories together, regardless of how disconnected some of these short and unconcluded scenes may feel. A character in “Idly” named Crutchfield discovers blood in his stool. He describes his anxiety as “some kind of heavy cloud of doubt in his stomach, (a) sky filled with gray, shadows like bruises over his lush lawn” that conjures a compelling mental image of a reality that can be nebulous and hard to articulate.

But more than the environment, LaJoie uses animals to illustrate how people influence nature. They focus on the consequences others pay for human cruelty in many of these tales. In the award-winning “The Locksmith,” a traumatic brain injury survivor spends his days mystified by the people for whom he unlocks doors. But he is drawn to a squished opossum on a railroad track and grows fascinated by the litter of babies struggling to get out.

LaJoie’s animals are as melancholic as the humans in “Little Ones’” and possess no shortage of quirks, like the cat in “Idly” that’s missing its frontal lobe and collects dead houseflies. In the heartbreaking tale “Delivery,” the point-of-view character is a dog that keeps winding up in the pound because of human folly. And “Snek & Goose” are but two of the numerous snakes and birds who complicate already uncomfortable situations.

The collection leans heavily into the macabre as it delves into “Frank,” a story about a road-killed raccoon whose carcass is being devoured as much by ants as acid rain. As Frank converses with God, the raccoon seems to deliver LaJoie’s thesis for the entire collection when he says, “The world had become a kind of scab, a burn mark where the humans had antagonized themselves almost away.”

LaJoie has plenty to say about the things that antagonize humans, but the stories depicting mental health crises linger in the memory with the most profound impact. “Aisle Six” follows a man identified as “the sinner” whom, while in the throes of a breakdown, is provoked into action by a conversation with his uneaten steak sitting on his dinner plate.

And then there is the 11-year-old in “Maria,” a child impossible to forget and not only because she tells the longest story. Maria is a neglected girl who is wise beyond her years. Maria is also haunted by bugs that live in her brain, a “feverish flapping of monarch butterflies and tiger moths” she can’t evade. The bugs are always there, driving her forward as she builds a statue that serves as a portal. Perhaps for her own escape?

The horrific and sad, the downtrodden and absurd, the macabre and the grotesque, all the hallmarks of compelling Southern gothic storytelling are on full display in Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s inventive “Little Ones.” Life is cruel, humans are harsh and animals pay the price in this inventive and memorable free-form collection.