Reviews

‘I feel more like a person than ever because I’m starting to hate myself.’

I’m a big fan of cats, and the big cat narrating Open Throat by Henry Hoke has certainly stolen my heart. Examining the blurred boundary between human and animal, Hoke’s heartfelt and often hilarious novella follows the stream-of-consciousness of a queer mountain lion based on P-22, a real-life mountain lion who crossed the 405 and the 101 freeways to live in Griffith Park. This is a novel that seems like it shouldn’t work, yet it does. And marvelously so, making elements that could quickly trip into cloyingly quirky instead rise up in emotional and satirical glory. Hoke’s sharp yet playful prose comes at us in double-spaced, single lines, reading almost like poetry as the lion navigates complex emotions from hunger and shame to repressed desires and concerns around identity, but their perspective (the lion tells us they are they/them) also gives us a fascinating gaze at human society from the perspective of an outsider on our gross inequalities, narcissisms and ecological terrors. A quick but powerful read, Hoke’s offbeat Open Throat makes the familiar seem strange and the strange so utterly satisfying through the eyes of an unforgettable and tender narrator that, while an animal themselves, explores what it means to be human, themes of domestication, and removal from the wild.

P-22, the “Hollywood Cat”

This is a wild ride. A quick book that could feasibly be finished in a single evening, Open Throat’s unconventionality manages to pull a wide range of emotions and insights through the narrative while keeping the reader in rapt attention. While we never learn the name of our feline narrator because ‘it’s not made of noises a person can make,’ we are treated to a deep investigation into their emotional state and concerns for society. I was delighted to learn how much of this story comes from real events about P-22, to whom this book is dedicated and inspired by (Hoke says the story was also inspired by the song Hollywood from Nick Cave, which reminded him of P-22). Its a similar feeling to when I’m reading [a:Ali Smith|68992|Ali Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1620558954p2/68992.jpg] and think ‘that is an oddly specific detail’ only to find it is entirely true, and the true events on the life of this lion are just as thrilling as the novel such as P-22 taking up residence under someone’s porch or having been the likely culprit in the devouring of a beloved LA zoo koala. In her eulogy for P-22, California director for the National Wildlife Foundation Beth Pratt said:

‘He changed us…He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that.’

This keys into a major theme of the novella, though as much as the lion makes us think about our humanity, the lion, in turn, feels they are becoming more human. A therapist is ‘something I want,’ for instance, though they also find annoyance in human behaviors. ‘I don’t trust screens to tell me who I am,’ they think upon seeing their reflection in a mirror.

‘I want to devour their sound / I have so much language in my brain / and nowhere to put it.’

The narration is made possible by the lion having picked up on human speech, either from the encampment of unhoused people for whom the lion feels an affinity for their shared outsider status or from the people hiking the trails.Sure, this may be a stretch for some but Hoke handles it in such a delightful way with situational irony and malapropisms that defamiliarizes the ordinary into an uncanny landscape where the abstractions of reality are more pronounced for analysis. Learning the language draws them closer to humans and I giggled at aspects such as picking up the word for helicopter but always as ‘fucking helicopter’ due to learning it from a man in tent city, or mistaking the term ‘scarcity mentality’ for ‘scare city’ which becomes an all-too-accurate name for LA.

‘I traded old fear for new fear.’

Becoming more human also means processing internal struggles (a theme I’ve quite enjoyed in the Murderbot series). In many ways this story is symbolic of repressed identities and the ways society commodifies everything to take the bite out of it. Watching two men have sex in a cave dredges up bittersweet memories of a “relationship” the lion had with another lion, ‘the kill sharer,’ but also the traumatic memories of being cast out from their lion society by a violent father. ‘A father to a kitten is an absence,’ they reflect, ‘a grown cat to a father is a threat.’ This vague tale of violence and abusive fathers is a familiar queer trope, and Hoke juxtaposes the history of violence with the violence present in human society. And not just the threat of death to cross the freeway—‘the long death’—but also violence humans display against their own outsiders such as an act of horrific cruelty towards the unhoused people the lion clings near. ‘I know what their hands can do and what their hands would do and the violence waiting behind every motion.’

I’ve never eaten a person / but today I might.’

The story also looks at the ways society will take anything raw, wild, or unfamiliar and commoditize (think of how capitalism will often co-opt activism in order to render it as nothing but slogans on t-shirts) or domesticate it, such as the imagery of a wild mountain lion becoming a half-starved, tame and timid creature slinking through the streets of scare city. A lion is a perfect symbol for a book set in hollywood, which is full of icons like the MGM lion or Simba that take a wild beast and turn it into family friendly marketing. Disney in particular is called out in a surreal scene late in the novel that briefly envisions the lion in full anthropomorphic adaptation walking on two legs and enjoying the rides of Disneyland. There is a bit of irony that in the most notable moments of domestication when a teenage girl takes in the lion, she also pays homage to their wildness, calling them ‘heckit’ (the mythological Hecate associated with ideas of transition) and refers to them as a goddess.

‘If you feel alone in the world / find someone to worship you’

Though for all the ways the lion sees humans as perpetuating many of the world’s ills, there is also that affinity and tenderness many of them. Particularly the outcasts. Though, as we see in the shocking ending, the world of humans and animals are always separate. Open Throat is a reminder of the violence that gets swept under the rug or the other sacrifices made in order for the masses to pretend we live in a polite society and is an excellent edition to the genre of animal perspectives showing us what being human really looks like. I also can’t wrap this up without mentioning that I will forever read novels about pumas in honor of Mike Puma, some of you here may remember him, a best friend that I miss every single day. Love you buddy. Anyways. Offbeat, humorous and often surreal, Open Throat is an endlessly readable tale that reminds us to embrace the wilderness and wild because society can never truly cage it.

4.5/5

Cause they say there is a cougar that roams these parts,
With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart
That she is white and rare and full of all kinds of harm
And stalks the perimeter all day long
But at night lays trembling in my arms.
-Nick Cave, Hollywood