At a space frontier, infected humans are turning into alien moth creatures and the government considers mass executing them all. A scientist who has seen signs of the moths' intelligence must fight for their lives.

A boy finds a mysterious caterpillar-like creature in the forest one day. He brings it home and kills it to add to his wildlife collection, but becomes haunted by creatures he can no longer control.

By trampling the grass as he walks the same route over and over to gather clams, an elderly man makes space for a bounty of primroses to flourish, which allows the moths and other pollinators to thrive. When he dies, the roses and moths follow suit.

A scientist travels across North America in search of a rare beetle, collecting stories along the way.

In modern-day China, a cohort of wasps skilled in cartography establishes a new colony, exercising their suppressive rule over a local beehive. One anarchist bee makes inroads into the wasp colony, setting in motion a subversion of the wasp monarchy and a new, pioneering generation of anarchist bees.

When a graduate student makes his way to Colorado with his recently unemployed girlfriend to visit his married friends, an alarming development in his friends’ marriage causes him to reevaluate his own relationship and, in the process, make a grave mistake.

A man adopts a cage full of insects that engage in ritual war against each other and soon comes to be their god. When he begins to act cruelly against them as a corrupt exploration of his own power, the insects escape and begin a killing spree.

Assuming that they were here to invade, mankind massacred the aliens whose ships landed on Earth. Now, the aliens and humans have an uneasy peace together. The aliens who landed on earth love to fly kites. One kite-maker sells them despite harassment from skinheads who hate the aliens and anyone who does business with them.

A young lute player is aided by a harmonizing spider who resides in her lute, unbeknownst to her. Though the spider becomes attached to the lute player, she continues to feel loneliness and longing for her home among other spiders in the forest of her birth.

Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.