The Dominant Animal
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Guardian, Southwest Review, and Publishers Weekly
"[The stories] are short, but their mood and imagery are lasting, and reflective of brutal truths of the commerce of human civilization . . . chilling, finely tuned pieces on power and survival." --Los Angeles Times
A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young literary artist
In The Dominant Animal—Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection—compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters—human and animal—eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another.
With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence—and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open—rather than tie—up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says—and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As with Aug 9 Fog, her adaptation of a real woman's diary, Scanlan craftily makes the stuff of everyday life seem strange and rare in this collection. There are 40 very short stories, often only long enough to lay out a situation before it's sneakily turned on its head. In "Florida Is for Lovers," a daughter goes through the objects left behind by her recently deceased parents, who were indifferent to her when living. A couple's stay in a foreign city is interrupted by their digestive troubles in "Please." "Colonial Revival" tracks a man's expanding fortunes after he comes home from a war before, over time, the fortunes shrink back, the dwindling crystallized in a final image of a pile of unwanted furniture. "Master Framer" follows a man who lies about his abilities for his advantage. Scanlan has a knack for subtly bending the ordinary into the uncanny, as when a narrator witnessing two boys chase each other around their yard with scissors wonders if it's a dream, or letting the gently irregular seep into the everyday, as when a woman creeps into her basement with a knife to eat some of "a large, costly wedge of aged cheese" while her ravenous partner is distracted upstairs. Reading Scanlan is akin to looking at two "spot the difference" images, but not knowing what, exactly, is off. This is a delightful, mischievous, and mysterious collection that's perfect for fans of Lydia Davis and Mary Ruefle.
