Animal Rights and Pornography: Stories

by J. Eric Miller

Miller grew up in a cabin in the woods of Colorado and the experience of the silence, darkness and depth that grows from being raised in near solitude is evident throughout his stories, laced with the wildness, rage, and tranquility that exists in the crags of the mountains. The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, American

110 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2004

About the author

Born in 1971, J. Eric Miller grew up in small miner towns Leadville and Twin Lakes, Colorado and went to high school in an Indian reservation in Montana. Educated at the University of Montana (Bachelor’s degree), the University of Southern California (Master’s degree), and the University of Denver (Doctoral degree). His book length publications include Animal Rights and Pornography (short stories) published by Soft Skull Press in July of 2002, and has since been translated and published in Russia by Limbus Press, and in French in 2010 by Passage Du Nord Ouest; Bloodletting and Fruits of Lebanon (novellas); and Decomposition (novel), published also in French both in hardcover and paperback editions.

After teaching literature and creative writing at the American University of Beiruit, J. Eric Miller is now an assistant professor of screenwriting at Kennesaw State University. His short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines, journals and ezines.

The protagonists of Miller’s works typically set out on a journey — reader in tow — to escape a times of crisis for some imagined better place over the horizon; in this way, these characters are essentially American, exploring — and, in Miller’s hands— updating and subverting the myth of Manifest Destiny. The spatial journey becomes also an internal one; along the road, the characters seek revised and idealized identity in a disturbingly disordered universe that challenges not only them — but also their readers — with existential questions. An activist at heart, especially for animal rights, Miller makes sure that all his published works have something to say.

Reviews

[Neli Krasimirova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bu kitabı 2014'te okumaya başlamış ve sonra bir şekilde unutmuşum. Neden unuttuğumu tekrar elime aldığımda farkettim: Korkunç kötü bir tercüme, öyle ki benim zamanımın anadolu lisesi öğrencisi çevirmiş gibi.
Diğer taraftan vaad edilen altıkırk"leş" bir öyküler topluluğu olmadığı gibi tam bir yeraltı olduğu da söylenemez.
Kitabın çevirisinden ziyade bir de başlık-içerik uyumsuzluğu da mevcut.
Toplamda bakıldığında vasat altı olan kitabı birkaç öykü ayakta tutuyor.

[Hungry Bug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ставлячи 5 цій книзі, я підтверджую свій нестабільний психічний стан 😌

[Leslie]

This is the book to read if you need convincing that humans are hideous and animals are less so. The humans are cruel in ways that ring true and, as a result, these stories bring on the shame. Here sex meets misery and/or dissociation. There’s incest, grotesque animal injuries, all varieties of mutilation. A prominent theme is the mental/physical/emotional gulf that necessarily exists between any two beings (human/human, animal/human, animal/animal) regardless of how intimate the beings seem to be. Unsettling done well!

[zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really short, horrifying stories. Torture, totally emotionless (or hateful) one night stands, incest, etc. It often was jarring enough to make me feel really upset. Brutality carried out thoughtfully. I would read one of these every time I took the BART. The screech of the track in the dark tunnels became a really fitting soundtrack to these stories.

[Liam Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a most interesting collection of short stories that will kick your morals back at you and leave you wondering whether it us humans, or the animal world, that is the most humane. While it may hit hard at your emotions, is a great source for compassion because of how it may sometimes hurt. Scary, thought provoking, down right disturbing at times, but it is something that will stay with you long after putting it down, and mostly because of the goodness you get from its stories. It'll make you cringe, it may make you tear up, but it will certainly make you think!! Enjoy.

[Richard]

Stark, haunting and immaculately brief, J. Eric Miller’s groundbreaking first collection resonates with minimalist restraint and lush, sensual depravity. A tale of incest as bland and grand as a creation myth sits alongside the story of a man accepting his own rape as he watches a stripper gyrate obliviously behind glass. From a character’s obsession with the nearly-alive beaver coat of a woman naked underneath to the terrifying smell of a pet shop whose clerk systematically tortures its caged occupants at night, Animal Rights and Pornography is both breathtakingly brutal and disarmingly tender. Its release heralds a brilliant and uncompromising new voice on the disturbing and uniquely American territory between violence and food, sex and death.

[Allison Floyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Powerful, violent, disturbing, wounded, tender, sad. Gothic with a capital G. It brought me much closer to vegetarianism than anything else I've encountered, and this includes the time a (not so) well-intentioned friend introduced me to "Meat is Murder" in an effort to persuade me to change my evil, bacon-loving ways. Bacon still wins, but man, the suffering in this book is cringe-inducing. The author definitely has a thematic preoccupation (hence the title), which at times renders these stories a one-note symphony; and the typos are frequent and egregious, which is distracting. But if you're looking to get a your visceral on (literally and figuratively), this is a good collection to turn to.

[zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrifying, funny, nasty and wicked. Miller writes in a blunt, direct, no-nonsense way that drags you almost unwillingly into the grotesque worlds he portrays. But as much kicking and screaming as you might do, you'll have to stay, because his short stories stun you.

My favorite stories were Hunger, John School, and Invisible Fish.

If you don't know the drill, each story has to do with either sex (mainly prostitution), the lives of animals, or both.

In this world, it's clear who are the villains.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the way Miller writes and I enjoyed some of the stories but over all I can't say I really cared for the collection. I didn't find anything particularly "animal rights" about this set of stories but lots of pornography. I feel like a lot of the pieces were just twisted thoughts the author had and wrote down then decided to cover them up with some sort of "message" that was completely lost to me. I don't know, it was merely okay for me. If I want to give someone a little book of odd things I would give them this but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a point.

[Reginald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has got to be one of the most disturbing, and undeniably good, short story collections I've read in awhile...

[Victoria Tarin- Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Animals lives matter

#notallprostitutes

[rndgmoat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh boy. There's another literary bad-boy here, writing transgressive fiction about people raping, killing, torturing, etcetera in minimalist prose. Maybe he and Michael Gira should get together?

Miller's book relentlessly confronts you with his seriousness. The black cover. The confrontational title. The stark, minimalist prose. The clinical descriptions of the most awful things you can imagine. To be fair, some of the stories toward the end aren't too bad. One or two might actually be decent. But overall, I just can't take this seriously. It's just too much dude shock lit for me. Seriously, there's a whole story about picking up a prostitute who turns out to, get this guys, have a *huge* vagina. Like terrifyingly large. But...it also, get this guys, sucks you in. No really, literally! It destroys you even as you want more! I'm convinced Elliot Rodgers ghost wrote that and no one can persuade me otherwise.
I mean, I get it. Men are fucked up and shitty! Maybe there's a way to write about how fucked up and shitty they are, but this comes off as edgelord bullshit. Meh.

[Randi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uncomfortable but effective? I'm not completely sure. Some stories felt unfinished. Others left me disgusted. I didn't love any of them, but this collection will probably still stick with me for a while.

[FEED ME KITTENS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbingly funny and funnily disturbing. Fantastic stories that made even me squirm in my seat.

[Phillip Neman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird collection of short stories

[C]

I was lent this book by someone who took his creative writing class.
The stories are a mix of grotesque and brutal grittiness, and all the taboos are covered.

I don't give it a rating, because I rate subjectively, and not as a more objective critic. The writing itself is good, the content is not something I enjoy (hence no rating), however I would expect that this is not a book intended for "enjoyment," but rather to share a message or provide an example. Other reviews give a good overview of these things.

Overall, it is brutal, graphic, and raw - but, as someone else pointed out, it's done in a manner that is bland (or, perhaps "blasé"). It did give some food for thought on ignorance, pain, sexuality and cruelty. The roofied man who is raped and abused in a hotel room...I had never thought of that possibility or scenario.

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a lot of unusual short stories collections, and I must say this is one of the strangest. Unfortunately, there's a bit more "pornography" (or at least sexuality) then there is "animal rights" in these stories, and in some of them, the author just seemed to be trying to be as gross or shocking as he could without really developing the story.

However, Miller is definitely smarter than the average bear when it comes to the thorny issues of animal ethics. In one story, a son embraces animal activism with the same passion and fury that his father embraced hunting and destroying animals. In another, a man is moved by the most humble and harmless creature--the lowly earthworm--into embracing a greater ethic for all living beings.

[Mariam · Rating 3 out of 5]

un livre très strange...mais qui confronte la misère humaine à la misère animal, en quelque sorte.

[Renée Sheppard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Passionate, brief, impressive. Not for the feint of heart or sensitive of stomach.