“Animals Taking Revenge”

This chapter examines Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead , revealing how the text works both within and against the conventions of the detective genre, reimagining environmental harm as an ecological encounter in which non-human animals are positioned as both victims and perpetrators of murder. The revenge killings committed by protagonist Janina thus unsettle the distinction between criminal/victim/detective, as well as between the human and the non-human. In the process, Tokarczuk dramatises the difficulties of assessing, and responding to, ecological crime.