4 ideas
Mikael, a gay photographer in Tampere who goes by Angel, finds a young troll being kicked by drunk youths in his courtyard and secretly takes it into his flat. He names it Pessi and grows fixated on it, drawn by what seems to be a musky scent it gives off, while feeding it, researching it, and using it in advertising photographs. His life reorganizes around the creature until he abandons the city and follows it into the forest.
The novel's otherness does not arrive from space. Once the troll is treated as zoologically real, the scrutiny turns back on the observers. The men who desire it, own it, or want to exploit it become the specimens whose behavior is being recorded.
The troll appears to trigger attraction through scent, and the men around Angel pursue each other through smell, display, and dominance. The book suggests that what they experience as romance or aesthetic taste works like the mating and territorial drives of animals. Human sexual choice is presented as less deliberate than it feels, pulled by signals below conscious judgment.
Short first-person chapters alternate with invented natural-history entries, folklore excerpts, and quoted sources, so that a fictional species builds up a citable record. Each fragment borrows the authority of its genre, and together they make the reader weigh evidence instead of doubting the premise. A parallel plot about Palomita, a Filipina bride confined next door, shows the same pattern of an exotic being bought, kept, and studied as a possession.