A Domestic Animal

by Francis King

Francis King's 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is the story of Antonio Valli, a brilliant young Italian philosopher, who arrives to do a year's research at a well-to-do university. He lodges with Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist, and his good looks and impulsive yet immensely likeable character soon have Dick captivated. Valli is someone who needs to be admired and loved and has an insatiable craving for attention from everyone he meets; he needs an audience to perform to and he finds this at the university, but especially in Dick's company. It is not long before Dick Thompson has fallen completely in love with his charming - but very heterosexual - lodger. What follows is an ill-fated relationship that can only end in disaster, but in A Domestic Animal King has created a novel of bitter longing and painful complexities. 'Few English novelists have written with more might and assurance . . .' Spectator

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Classics, Gay, British Literature

211 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Francis Henry King, CBE, was a British novelist, poet and short story writer.

He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland, brought up in India and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land. After completing his degree in 1949 he worked for the British Council; he was posted around Europe, and then in Kyoto. He resigned to write full time in 1964.

He was a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the scarcity of reviews/ratings for this attest, Francis King seems to have been all but forgotten these days - although this and his novel Act of darkness were both longlisted for the Booker Prize; this one for the 'Lost Booker' for books published in 1970, when this first came out (after some revisions necessitated when one of King's compatriots sued him, claiming that one of the characters was based on him!), and it's astonishingly frank about homosexuality, which was so NOT the case back then.

The book details the frustrated longings of English novelist Dick Thompson (surely an autobiographical stand-in for the author, although he denied that), for his masculine, but infuriatingly obtuse Italian tenant, Antonio. Antonio has a wife and kids back home, but while camping out at Dick's flat, takes up with a common and rather vulgar young woman, Pam. This, of course, raises Dick's hackles, but he tries his best to sublimate his jealousy and ardent feelings.

While the plot is engrossing, what really sets this apart is the prose itself, which on a line-by-line basis is some of the finest in contemporary literary fiction. I'll be reading more of King's back catalogue, he's just that good.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must state again that I love the work of Francis King - I think he is a novelist and short story writers whose work has never been acknowledged for its quality - he was immensely prolific (at least by today's standards) but what stands out is how good his books are. Almost all his works contain or are suffused with elements or sub plots that are queer or at the very least contain strong sexual attraction between men. 'A Domestic Animal' was his most openly Gay or Queer novel and it is a very fine tale of the love/desire of one man for another (unreciprocated in terms of desire but not necessarily in terms of love - but what, or maybe better on whose, terms?).

It can appear at times that the milieu - social, intellectual, political - in which his novels are set is a vanished one and thus his books might at one stage have said to have dated - but as time goes on it is amazing how irrelevant that seems now as the world and the mores that replaced the ones of Mr. King's youth no longer seem new or exciting or, it some cases, even relevant and often they now appear tawdry and unmemorable. Mr. King's novels are ageing well, their great strengths shine forth and the relevance of their settings seems irrelevant - after all do we care that the worlds of Austen and Dickens are more alien to us?

Mr. King was one of number of very fine English novelists who tackled gay themes in many ways and forms long before ' gay liberation' came to the fore in the USA (which is not in anyway meant to lessen the importance of what the American movement brought to Gays in the UK) who had a distinctive voice and covered 'gay' themes in a different but often more open way then was current in the USA but writers like Francis King, Angus Wilson and many others have for to long been sidelined first by their Post-Stonewall American competitors and then secondly by the generation of UK writers, such as Alan Hollinghurst and Patrick Gale, who are treated as if they are the first UK 'gay' writers dealing with 'gay' subjects to have success with non-gay readers. I don't begrudge any writer trying to sell books but this ridiculous assumption that 'straight' readers can't and won't read about 'gay' characters/situations is simply not held up by history. Mr. King and others were doing this long before there was a 'gay' market and this novel deserves to been remembered and read not simply as an important work in the gay cannon but as a fine novel.

Again I want to pay tribute to Gay Men's Press who reissued this novel and many other unique works and whose loss is still greatly to be regretted. It also has a very fine and attractive cover art - something that was sadly lacking on many brilliant GMP publications - in fact so much of the cover art was excruciatingly bad that I feel it my duty to highlight the exceptional good ones.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally superb and bound to be a favorite of the year. Francis King was well liked in his time but has been largely forgotten, but I agree with his contemporaries that he is a prose artist in the class of Greene and Nabokov. I haven’t read something so simply and unadornedly heart-breaking since Isherwood’s A Single Man. Captures with terrible accuracy the ill-fated unrequition gay men so often face, not only in their romantic lives but in any hope of understanding from the outside world.

The narrator is not necessarily virtuous or selfless but he is oh, so human and sympathetic.

I wish I could read more, but it seems most of his many books are out of print… we will see how resourceful I can be in reading more and learning more of this great writer!

[Samuel Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not at all what you'd expect from a novel written in the late 60s. Also loved reading about the libel lawsuit that financially ruined the author because of this book. I think this has to be the 2nd best King book I've read thus far after To The Dark Tower.

[WndyJW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fantastic republished gem from @mcnallyeditions. I'll be thinking about this one for awhile, wondering how Dick is doing and if Antonio found what he was looking for. This is an intimate portrait of the torment Dick's unrequited love caused him and of the torment Antonio's obsession with fellow college student Pam caused him and the conflict of loving his family and chafing at the constraints of marriage.

The humor comes in the banter between the fussy, particular Dick with his home full of lovely, valuable items and the effusive, live for the moment Antonio, who leaves a mess everywhere he goes. The warmth between Dick and Antonio is touching and the story well written and well paced. I highly recommend this very human story.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a university town and everyone has international lodgers. Penny has Masa from Japan, Antonio from Italy and a dreadful Swiss girl. In her opinion, Italians aren't domestic animals and so she's keen to be rid of Antonio.

Fortunately, he's a bit of a hunk (if you like hairy shoulders and tight brown corduroy) and her friend Francis agrees to take him in.

Antonio enjoys Francis's company but only ends up shagging the fairly dreadful Pam. Poor old Francis is incredibly jealous.


"'Why do all these Japanese suffer from piles?'"

"Quite the toast of Oxford – even if the toast was beginning to get a little charred."

"'I saw Diana in the supermarket yesterday and I stared her straight in the face … But of course she wouldn't meet my gaze – oh no! All at once she became tremendously interested in the meat-counter – and her a vegetarian!'"

"'Ralph and Mervyn – I cannot understand two men living together like that.'
'Can't you? Why not?'
Suddenly his tone of contemptuous superiority began to make me angry.
'Two men living together like a married couple – it is ridiculous.'
'I think that your marriage is far more ridiculous.'
His head swivelled round, so that it was no longer gazing with a moody intensity out of the window of the train but gazing at me. I had astonished him: that, and not indignation or anger, was his dominant emotion.
'What do you mean?'
'Ralph and Mervyn have lived together ever since they were students. Ten years, eleven years. As far as I know they've never been unfaithful to each other. I've never once seen them quarrel. I see nothing "ridiculous" in a relationship like that. Whereas your marriage – writing letters every morning to your wife and fucking Pam every evening – does seem to me ridiculous. A farce.'"

[Sean Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

McNally Editions have yet to disappoint me.

This books was written beautifully and I loved how King used time in his point of view. The observations of people are fantastic, but his dissection of the feeling attached to unrequited love was masterful. The language was perfectly specific and casually profound. Dick writes from the future and as such leaves guideposts telling where the story is heading, and yet I still found myself turning page after page in anticipation of the plot. I really enjoyed my time with this book.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Francis King's 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is the story of Antonio Valli, a brilliant young Italian philosopher, who arrives to do a year's research at a well-to-do university. He lodges with Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist, and his good looks and impulsive yet immensely likeable character soon have Dick captivated.

Valli is someone who needs to be admired and loved and has an insatiable craving for attention from everyone he meets; he needs an audience to perform to and he finds this at the university, but especially in Dick's company. It is not long before Dick Thompson has fallen completely in love with his charming—but very heterosexual—lodger.

What follows is an ill-fated relationship that can only end in disaster, but in A Domestic Animal King has created a novel of bitter longing and painful complexities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it easier to fall in love with someone who can't return your feelings, or someone who won't? Unlike the girl who doesn't love you back, Dick Thompson's love object Antonio Valli can't reciprocate his feelings...Antonio Valli is a straight man.

This is how the story frames its unhappy ending, or at the most charitable of my responses, its bittersweet ending: A straight man with a very intense psychological need to seduce and captivate those he's identified as powerful chooses a gay man whose lust is barely concealed to ensorcel. It was written in the 1960s, so this was pretty advanced stuff. Dick Thompson is not presented as sick,or weird, or as a pervert. He's simply made a bad bet on a man...everyone can relate to that.

Nowadays we'd call Dick Thompson "sapiosexual" and Antonio Valli a "queerbaiter". I suspect that, in a novel written on this model in 2026, Antonio would be heteroflexible if only to cement his conquest of Dick. It is a conquest, a thoroughly (though not consciously, I think) intentional act of subjugation for the purposes of the conqueror's ego gratification.

Antonio Valli is an unapologetic bounder...fucks Pam, a loud, vulgar woman despite pretending (in my opinion it's a pretense) not to know how much this hurts his inappropriately-but-consensually emotionally attached host Dick Thompson, despite being married and having a family with the wife left in Italy. He is fully in control of Dick Thompson's emotions. Only when Dick Thompson dares to display some liveliness of spirit in an indirect calling-out of his caddish behavior towards both women does Antonio Valli deign to treat Dick Thompson's feelings as real, as something not deliberately evoked as part of his power-play, his ownership of Dick Thompson's feelings.

Dick Thompson is utterly besotted by Antonio Valli in so many ways. He's queer, knows he's queer, but does nothing to approach sexual activity with Antonio Valli because, in that time, bottoms like women waited to be approached or risked serious consequences...physical, reputational, emotional. Dick Thompson revels in his emotional subjugation for the same reason submissives everywhere enter into Dom/sub relationships: I'll let you hurt me if you'll really choose me, own me, care for me. If this book was ever filmed it would have to be made like Pillion , an exploration of the consuming need some people have to be the full focus of another's attention. It is a deep, and from what I know about it, life-long need that finds a way to get met that can change over time...but is never satisfied. That fact is never clearer than in the ending of this novel.

Antonio Valli, in his lordly disdain for anything not immediately satisfying to his own clawing desperation to be central to the life of someone he actually admires, chooses Pam over Dick as his bedmate...but never lets Dick off his emotional hook, or allows Pam to be more than a sexual obsession. He is a man of his time, the kind we all hope is disappearing: the thoughtless user, convinced he should be able to do just as he likes and you should do just as he likes as well. It was the privilege of maleness at that time. I suspect that 1970 readers of this novel really didn't interrogate that Antonio Valli was perfectly ordinary, at least until they were confronted by Dick Thompson's emotional responses to his arrogance.

Has all that much changed? Heavens yes. Has it changed for the better? Mixed bag on that one. As a member of Dick Thompson's native minority, I'll say mostly yes on his behalf. One thing that's changed is the desuetude of the unrequited love/unhappy ending novel. I think the point of this story stands out in relief against that uglier truth of the ending: Men loving each other the way Ralph and Mervyn do can exist, men can and do fall in love with each other (even relentlessly heterosexual ones), and gay love is fraught, complicated, and very much as interesting as cishet love.

Lest y'all think Francis King was simply talking about the subject, know that he was my fellow AIDS widower. He, much like Dick Thompson, led a quietly queer life in a time where this could easily have led him onto nasty legal troubles à la Alan Turing. I suspect but cannot prove that Pam, Antonio Valli's object of sexual obsession, was modeled after King's friend Anne Cumming (albeit unflatteringly). King was not exoticizing or fetishizing his straight man in love with a man he had no desire to fuck. He was most likely discussing his own life in too-thinly veiled terms.

Brave of him. A major step towards accurate representation of gay life in the days before liberation began. Still not that great, it's centering desire for a cishet man, but definitely honest and in its day quite positive.

[Nil · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'how long?' it was difficult to think of a time when each hour had not been gorged with his presence or the memory of his presence or the expectation of his presence."

"... I would staunch the blood and lick the wounds. 'Forgive me' I would say as we lay close to each other; and 'Forgive me' he would murmur back."

[Amy Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

[mild spoilers, but this is a character study, not a plot-centric book, so I'm not hiding them.]
This story of a quiet man grappling with an unrequited and ultimately self-destructive love wasn't quite what I was expecting, but it grew on me. Impossible not to make comparisons to Giovanni's Room, with the cultural differences and tortured main character, but this feels like a more realistic read, if less satisfying.

From their first meeting, Dick's love for Antonio is less a plot than a deadlock. At first, I found myself longing for more complexity and movement in Antonio's character--if not discovering he's bi, at least discovering, in some decisive moment, that he's not. But no, he stays a lusty, thoroughly straight Italian throughout, happy to be pampered and adored as long as nothing is expected of him in return. This makes Dick's masochistic love for him even more brutal and distressing. If you've ever been a giver or receiver of unrequited love, you know that despite the heady nuances of your very special situation, at bottom it all boils down to the ruthless equation of "I love X, X doesn't love me." For a gay man in the '60s who's not quite in tune with his more liberated brethren, this is worse than a brick wall; it's a cage. Eventually I came to appreciate the subtleties of King's depiction of that cage. He's particularly gifted with metaphors for pain, which stand out as sharply visceral, almost hallucinatory. Still, it's a hard read.

Certain dated elements (weird depictions of race, ugly views toward women, assumptions about how and why men "become" gay) were initially tough to get past. As the book wore on, however, I began to see Dick's prickliness as the flip side to his aching vulnerability. It's not like he doesn't realize he's playing into stereotypes, surrounding himself with beautiful things as a substitute for human relationships. Dick may seem to see Antonio as a coveted object just out of reach, but Antonio treats Dick even more like an object--one he doesn't care about breaking. He's a bull in a china shop. We all know one of those.

[josé · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a read. king writes about unrequited love in a such a chilling and compelling form. it was easy to become absorbed by the love affairs, the jealousy, and madness felt by thompson - king delivers these emotions + themes through his outstanding prose. in other words, king writes each sentence as though he were writing the yearners guide to yearning.

spoilers(ish):

now, speaking freely: thompson, wishing u well but pull it together, now! antonio, bruh- i dont even know what to say to u but hoping ur wife sees what a horrible and evil person u are. pam, girl, ur lowkey evil and by lowkey i mean highkey. also the section where antonio talks about gay couples living together being “ridiculous” while carrying out an affair was unbelievable (but not really ig) - anyway that was the one part where i cheered thompson on, keep him in check!!!!

great read, recommend to all!

5/5

[Dol Leander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recieved as an ARC through my job. This novel is a stunning portrait of unrequited attraction, beautiful in both topic and prose. The quality of the writing itself makes it impossible to put down, dragging you through the highs and lows along with the characters. As the self-admitted unreliable narrator wavers between the joy of friendship and the self-destructive obsession that has taken hold, you cannot help but start to feel the same for this infuriatingly unobtainable man. Every moment is made that much more devastating as it becomes clear that, while his desire is not reciprocated, his love is shared in a way that could never be wholly satisfying. There is a true catharsis to be found in the peaks of suffering and the slow melancholy that follows.

[Rustic Red Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks for netgalley and McNally Editions for providing an e-arc* in exchange for an honest review

*I guess it's still an e-ARC but it's already released out there, but McNally is just printing it again.

You'll feel a lot of things for the main character (Dick Thompson) - pity, annoyance, cringe, and maybe even hatred. It's about Dick's loneliness and longing for someone he know he wouldn't get. It's about his choices just to please Antonio.

That scene near the end is just so depressing and quite startling. This book makes me want to try other King's works.

[Makayla Quillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of true catharsis. I love an unreliable narrator it’s clear Dick is too besotted with Antonio to truly grasp the lengths of his faults, an immature petulant man. Through his eyes however I found him to be quite like-able. Which is perhaps the point. Francis King truly grasps the depth of love and longing with beautiful imagery. Unrequited love has entered the chat.
<3

[Brandon Carestia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review: 4.6/5
Phew. Talk about a novel that captures unrequited love. The narrator’s fixation on a man who can’t love him back teeters between understandable longing and uncomfortable obsession. King captures the narrator’s emotions with poetic ease. I’d highly recommend this if you’re looking for a queer novel to read in 2026.

[Tara Ryan-Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrequited yearning is at it's finest in this overdue reissue of a 1970 masterpiece! A young Italian philosopher, Antonio, lodges with and captures the affection of a middle-aged English novelist, Dick.

Francis King delivers a masterclass in character studies providing psychological insight into each character, including the university student Antonio is enthralled by and Dick is jealous of.

[Daren Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enthralling tale of unrequited love.

[mippers · Rating 5 out of 5]

“italians are not domestic animals”

[Stargirlrosiered :) · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading an incredible queer yearning book, if you will, this lacked so much depth. Was still beautifully saddening to read and encounter.