The celebrity mountain lion known as P-22 was trapped and euthanised because of illness last year, after more than a decade stalking Los Angeles. P-22 was a metaphorical powerhouse: the American dream, human rapaciousness, immigration, fame, Hollywood masculinity – was there anything he couldn’t stand in for? His memorial service sold out in minutes; he kept many US journalists in gainful, precarious employment; and a version of him stars in Henry Hoke’s Open Throat.
In Hollywood, cats have pronouns and this one’s are they/them, making Open Throat the best book narrated by a genderqueer feline you’ll read this year. This is a one-sitting novelette, an instant classic of xenofiction, with copious line breaks, sketchy punctuation and plenty of leonine misunderstandings – “scarcity” is rendered as “scare city”, “LA” as “ellay”, money is “green paper”. In a worse novel it would cloy.
