Over the past few years, non-human narrators have cropped up repeatedly in experimental fiction. There was the slowly decaying protagonist of Emma Glass’s Peach and, most recently, in Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the villainous voice of cancer spreading through a woman’s body, charting its journey with exquisite, sometimes menacing, lyricism.
In Virginia-born Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, Los Angeles’ much-adored mountain lion P-22 (so-called because it was the 22nd puma in a national park service study) gets this literary treatment. “I’ve never eaten a person but today I might,” begins the big cat’s account of the comings and goings in Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills, where the late P-22 roamed. The person to prompt this change of dietary preference (described as “the man with the whip”) is first encountered dressed as a cowboy, engaged in some kind of illicit sexual activity. He only appears on three occasions in the novel, but unwittingly becomes the feline’s long-running nemesis, a symbol of everything wrong with humanity.
