She defines this as an aesthetic lens and sensibility that, while acknowledging the extremity of animal suffering, seeks to draw sustenance from what has previously only caused pain.

It ... offers a riposte to the unprecedented scale of animal death and the lived experience of late capitalism in which political resistance feels futile.

This performance of complicity ... provides a way of working through horror and continuing to fight for change in the face of the seeming impossibility of living an ethical life.

In this sense, complicity affords a temporary mode of ethical affiliation, a way of occupying the present that acknowledges rather than castigates feelings of failure and insufficiency.

[10] She further identifies monstrous vegans in the work of H. G. Wells (including The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Time Machine), Margaret Atwood (including the MaddAddam trilogy), J. M. Coetzee (specifically the character Elizabeth Costello of the eponymous novel and The Lives of Animals), and Alan Hollinghurst (in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Sparsholt Affair).