Antisocial, Honest Love: On "Pets: An Anthology"

The relationship between pets and humans, like that still-unnamed stray cat you’ve been feeding for years, is often taken for granted and minimized in its importance. Pets aren’t human, no matter what dogs may think, and it is for this reason that the dynamic between human and beast is so integral to understanding the human condition.

When we associate with our fellow evolved bipeds, affectation and pretension are never far off; person-to-person interactions, even between our loved ones, revolve around certain intrinsic strictures that must never be upended, lest we risk exposing our true natures. With people, you can very rarely be completely honest, or your “complete” self.

This is not the case with pets. When we interact with animals, the judgmental, watchful human eye is nonexistent. More often than we’d like to admit, it is not our friends and family who have access to our basest and most honest selves, but our pets. Think of the times you’ve wept in front of your cat or told your dog some antisocial atrocity you wouldn’t dare utter to even your closest friend. 

In Pets, the new anthology from Tyrant Books, we find some of our great young writers—Scott McClanahan, Chelsea Hodson, Nicolette Polek, Mallory Whitten, and Sam Pink, to name a few—reflecting on their relationships with pets, past and present, resulting in some of the most honest writing I’ve read in a very long time.

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The anthology was edited by Jordan Castro and contains 22 stories. Associating with a pet allows one to be released from one’s human inhibitions; in no small way, this anthology speaks to the cathartic power of our memories and our pets’ places in them. The pets profiled in the anthology, including a demented chihuahua, a pair of endangered tortoises, a stuffed—yes, stuffed—dog named Domani, and a ragtag crew of emotive chickens, are not just companions to their human counterparts, but muses. 

The anthology opens with Michael W. Clune’s “The Measure of Love,” a tale of love and revenge in which Laila, a demure forty-pound rescue of indeterminate breed, is assaulted by two unleashed, overly friendly neighborhood goons. Clune and Laila take daily walks; the act of strolling takes on the form of genuine aesthetic experience: “I look down on those who walk without dogs, protruding their basic shivering sight into the world alone. Images have a brittle, two-dimensional cast for such walkers, lacking the complement of a dog’s nose, ungrounded in the rich invisible odorous side of nature.”

Clune is deep in the reverie, in tune with Laila and his surroundings, when the two beastly dogs appear on the horizon and disrupt the carefully constructed universe of their walk. They bound toward Laila, seeking a new play partner, and Laila, fear-stricken, bolts. Clune loses her and panics, his angle of vision shifting in the process: “The measure of love is vengeance. The magnitude of your love is directly related to the severity of the revenge you are prepared to exact.”

Laila is quickly found, but not before Clune vows revenge on the two dog owners who disrupted his sacred walk with his beloved Laila. They must pay for what they’ve done. A plan is concocted, and Clune learns what he always knew but had never been forced to articulate: We will transform into beasts in order to protect the beings we love. 

Editor Jordan Castro with his handsome companion Kevin. Credit: Nicolette Polek

In “Hat and Bonnie,” Chelsea Hodson writes of her relationship with two endangered tortoises who “seemed ancient and fragile.” Hodson was obsessed with dogs as a child—dog was her first word—but due to her mother’s allergies, the universe delivered her what is perhaps the anti-dog: the tortoise. It is this cruel—and hilarious—twist of fate that seemingly initiates Hodson’s writerly understanding of the world, as the gulf between what we want and what we get is so often where our personalities are forged. You learn, if you’re lucky, to live in this space, where expectation is rarely met, but where appreciation can still thrive, if only you’ll allow it.

Hodson watches her tortoises as they go to the sliding glass door every evening, where they await their dinner, those “most boring of dinosaurs.” The tortoises were not what she wanted, but in casually observing their unhurried pace day in and day out, their everyday magic begins to shine. Hodson, the writer, is born.

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One of my favorite pieces in the anthology is “Frankie,” by novelist Kristen Iskandrian, about a problematic pound dog who looks “like a cross between a fox and a deer,” and how he slowly endears himself to the author, who was vehemently against the idea of a pet, especially a dog. Iskandrian disdains the idea of a dog, and she feels just as strongly about animal-related writing: “Let the record show that I consciously avoid prose about an animal being someone’s unlikely sage or savior.” This makes for a wonderful conceit, as the very fact that Iskandrian has even written this story is proof that she has, like so many of us, been charmed by an animal we were convinced would never be able to win us over. 

What follows is a wonderful story of a dog who pisses everywhere, discovers his bark (which is “sharp, loud, and continuous”), and brings the author into contact with Peggy, a trainer for the ages. Peggy, with great aplomb, delivers existential one-liners like this: “The dog is the dog, it is you who must be trained.”

Peggy does what she can with Frankie, who improves ever-so-slightly, but as he is now “a member of the family, a main character,” he is there to stay, Iskandrian having become his unlikely master: “I made him mine, or he made me his.” Having been overcome by a pet, Iskandrian delivers what her non-dog-owning self would’ve considered grossly melodramatic, an epiphany brought about by a mangy mutt: “I now believe that commitment can come first, and love can follow.” Good job, Frankie.

The most affecting piece in the anthology is “Franny” by Patty Yumi Cottrell, in which devotion for a pet is taken to near pathological levels. Franny, a black cat, is Cottrell’s first pet; in the twilight of her life, Franny is suffering from a litany of illnesses. Cottrell takes on the dual roles of caretaker and illness investigator, her every waking moment dedicated to a cat that “means more to [her] than [her] own family.”

Cottrell misses important events and refuses to travel, her devotion nearly evicting her from her life. Miraculously, Cottrell wins two literary awards, granting her the ability to write the books she’d been putting off writing. But that doesn’t happen, of course: “I would write three books with the money over the next two years. That’s what I envisioned. Instead, as soon as I cashed the checks, I began to take my cat to different vets, to try to gather opinions on what was wrong.”

Cottrell, no doubt, is at the extreme end of pet ownership, but she behaves this way because, as a writer, she understands that pets are not only creatures we come to love, but narrative markers. The arrival of a pet, as does its death, marks the passage of time, and gives shape to the narrative of our life, which is what Pets so deftly captures. 

Follow Alex Perez on Twitter. You can purchase “Pets” from Tyrant Books.