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The Pet Thief
The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science, rebellion, humankind’s inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and survival in a post-human world.
When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals—cats, specifically—for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure, producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless fundamentally defective.
Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.
Oboy is unable to think or speak except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda’s mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to “rescue” every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come unraveled.
When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals—cats, specifically—for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure, producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless fundamentally defective.
Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.
Oboy is unable to think or speak except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda’s mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to “rescue” every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come unraveled.
- GenresFiction
352 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 2013
212 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 20, 2013
Originally published at DigBoston:
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
To call Kassten Alonso’s second novel The Pet Thief challenging would be an understatement. But to call it a challenge not worth taking would be an outright lie.
The book can best be described as difficult reading. And I mean that as a compliment.
Like difficult listening, (think Sonic Youth at their most avant-garde and adventurous or Capt. Beefheart’s high functioning lunacy on Trout Mask Replica) difficult reading demands a lot from its audience.
Nothing is spoon-fed to you here; you’ll have to unlearn the conventional forms and structure of traditional storytelling if you want to navigate your way through the midnight world of The Pet Thief.
And to be clear: I personally am not a fan of artists making difficult work simply for the sake of being artsy or purposely oblique. But Lou Reed’s nearly career-destroying Metal Machine Music this is (thankfully) not.
The juice is well worth the squeeze with this story. But what exactly is that story? And what makes it so good and so difficult?
The reason that The Pet Thief is such a compelling and challenging read is its narrator Oboy.
You see, Oboy is a hybrid cat-person.
Created, like many other human/animal hybrids, for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications. And like the rest of these creations, he is a failed experiment. A defective. A walking mistake.
But here’s where Alonso takes what could be a perfectly serviceable science fiction novel about genetically engineered “cat people”
(Just try and read those two words and not instantly hear Bowie belting out, “Putting out fire with gasoline!”) and turns it on its head:
Our narrator Oboy is unable to speak or think except in mimicry. Which means the entire novel is told from his jangled and patchwork perspective.
“Stones my fingers tootsies climb. Clicky green shutter my hand shuts. Boiled cabbage. Burnt toast. Splintery panter box. Windowsill. Rainwater head comes. Blinky metal eyes clink clink.”
What?
Exactly. But as nonsensical as that sounds at first, eventually, Oboy’s fractured, Burroughsesque cutup method beat poetry will start to make sense to you as a reader.
And that’s when the fun begins.
If you’re looking for a comparable reading experience, one can be found with Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and its population of droogs with their Nadsat language. Or some more recent examples would be Palahniuk’s Pygmy with its broken English narrator or better yet, last year’s mind breaker from David David Katzman called A Greater Monster, which, like The Pet Thief, gleefully blurs the lines between fiction and poetry.
I’d mention Trainspotting by Welsh but I have never been able to penetrate the Scots/Scottish English language of that book.
That’s right, I had an easier time learning to understand a human/cat hybrid’s mimic language than figuring out what the hell Scottish junkies are talking about.
Which is a testament to Alonso’s characterization and storytelling. Even though Oboy isn’t strictly human he is a fully realized and highly sympathetic character.
And I write that as someone who unabashedly hates cats. (Seriously, cat lovers and cat apologists, cats aren’t complicated, they’re just assholes.)
But Oboy and the rest of the hybrid cast, most notably Oboy’s mentor and at times tormentor, the femme fatale of the piece, the cat-person Freda, are all rendered perfectly with the limited lens of Oboy’s imitation speak.
Freda becomes, in many ways, Gatsby to Oboy’s Carraway in that the book is just as much about her as it is Oboy. Freda rescues (or kidnaps) Oboy at the beginning of the novel and proceeds to indoctrinate and enlist him into her vengeance campaign against the world that created them.
Like Frankenstein’s monster and V from V for Vendetta before her, Freda is a classic literary character, the damaged creation seeking revenge against her creator.
And much like the stories those other characters populate, as The Pet Thief goes on Freda’s motivations, which begin quite righteously and get murkier and murkier as we witness to what extent she is willing to go for her pound of flesh.
So ultimately, despite the difficult reading and the exotic storytelling that marks the novel’s beginning, the overall experience taken from The Pet Thief is a quite familiar one.
Like many of the best stories, at its heart it is about the struggle for identity.
The struggle to transcend where we come from, what we are, and even who we think we are.
While we as an audience try to make sense of the story that Oboy gives to us, our search for clarity mirrors Oboy’s own. He seeks answers to the questions that we all have: who am I and why am I here?
Of course he has a stranger way of asking these questions than when do. But as his story beautifully illustrates, the answers he finds are no weirder than the ones any of us do.
And there’s nothing difficult about reading into that.
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
To call Kassten Alonso’s second novel The Pet Thief challenging would be an understatement. But to call it a challenge not worth taking would be an outright lie.
The book can best be described as difficult reading. And I mean that as a compliment.
Like difficult listening, (think Sonic Youth at their most avant-garde and adventurous or Capt. Beefheart’s high functioning lunacy on Trout Mask Replica) difficult reading demands a lot from its audience.
Nothing is spoon-fed to you here; you’ll have to unlearn the conventional forms and structure of traditional storytelling if you want to navigate your way through the midnight world of The Pet Thief.
And to be clear: I personally am not a fan of artists making difficult work simply for the sake of being artsy or purposely oblique. But Lou Reed’s nearly career-destroying Metal Machine Music this is (thankfully) not.
The juice is well worth the squeeze with this story. But what exactly is that story? And what makes it so good and so difficult?
The reason that The Pet Thief is such a compelling and challenging read is its narrator Oboy.
You see, Oboy is a hybrid cat-person.
Created, like many other human/animal hybrids, for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications. And like the rest of these creations, he is a failed experiment. A defective. A walking mistake.
But here’s where Alonso takes what could be a perfectly serviceable science fiction novel about genetically engineered “cat people”
(Just try and read those two words and not instantly hear Bowie belting out, “Putting out fire with gasoline!”) and turns it on its head:
Our narrator Oboy is unable to speak or think except in mimicry. Which means the entire novel is told from his jangled and patchwork perspective.
“Stones my fingers tootsies climb. Clicky green shutter my hand shuts. Boiled cabbage. Burnt toast. Splintery panter box. Windowsill. Rainwater head comes. Blinky metal eyes clink clink.”
What?
Exactly. But as nonsensical as that sounds at first, eventually, Oboy’s fractured, Burroughsesque cutup method beat poetry will start to make sense to you as a reader.
And that’s when the fun begins.
If you’re looking for a comparable reading experience, one can be found with Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and its population of droogs with their Nadsat language. Or some more recent examples would be Palahniuk’s Pygmy with its broken English narrator or better yet, last year’s mind breaker from David David Katzman called A Greater Monster, which, like The Pet Thief, gleefully blurs the lines between fiction and poetry.
I’d mention Trainspotting by Welsh but I have never been able to penetrate the Scots/Scottish English language of that book.
That’s right, I had an easier time learning to understand a human/cat hybrid’s mimic language than figuring out what the hell Scottish junkies are talking about.
Which is a testament to Alonso’s characterization and storytelling. Even though Oboy isn’t strictly human he is a fully realized and highly sympathetic character.
And I write that as someone who unabashedly hates cats. (Seriously, cat lovers and cat apologists, cats aren’t complicated, they’re just assholes.)
But Oboy and the rest of the hybrid cast, most notably Oboy’s mentor and at times tormentor, the femme fatale of the piece, the cat-person Freda, are all rendered perfectly with the limited lens of Oboy’s imitation speak.
Freda becomes, in many ways, Gatsby to Oboy’s Carraway in that the book is just as much about her as it is Oboy. Freda rescues (or kidnaps) Oboy at the beginning of the novel and proceeds to indoctrinate and enlist him into her vengeance campaign against the world that created them.
Like Frankenstein’s monster and V from V for Vendetta before her, Freda is a classic literary character, the damaged creation seeking revenge against her creator.
And much like the stories those other characters populate, as The Pet Thief goes on Freda’s motivations, which begin quite righteously and get murkier and murkier as we witness to what extent she is willing to go for her pound of flesh.
So ultimately, despite the difficult reading and the exotic storytelling that marks the novel’s beginning, the overall experience taken from The Pet Thief is a quite familiar one.
Like many of the best stories, at its heart it is about the struggle for identity.
The struggle to transcend where we come from, what we are, and even who we think we are.
While we as an audience try to make sense of the story that Oboy gives to us, our search for clarity mirrors Oboy’s own. He seeks answers to the questions that we all have: who am I and why am I here?
Of course he has a stranger way of asking these questions than when do. But as his story beautifully illustrates, the answers he finds are no weirder than the ones any of us do.
And there’s nothing difficult about reading into that.
June 11, 2013
Hybridized human/cats with uncanny abilities--in some ways, the premise of this novel might seem familiar, but reading it is an experience of defamiliarization. And the action of the story is as much about what they do as what and who they are.
The storytelling here stays very, very close to the consciousnesses of its protagonists. Their voices are unlike any I've read. My initial confusion gave way to terror and envy and delight. It really is like learning another language. With Alonso's CORE I guess I had a way of reading the distillations and eccentricities as reflections of a world a little familiar to me; here even that handhold is gone...
And amid the technical inventiveness, here, what really sings is the sweet characterization of Oboy and Freda and their relationship. So strange and right.
Perhaps the most amazing and moving thing to me is how Oboy's voice handles action--the way the language itself both describes and conveys his inner and outer movements through space. There's nothing like that, the way we stay inside it, that strange traveling.
As my comments suggest, the first 15-20 pages demand a lot of a reader, but once you're in, you're in.
The storytelling here stays very, very close to the consciousnesses of its protagonists. Their voices are unlike any I've read. My initial confusion gave way to terror and envy and delight. It really is like learning another language. With Alonso's CORE I guess I had a way of reading the distillations and eccentricities as reflections of a world a little familiar to me; here even that handhold is gone...
And amid the technical inventiveness, here, what really sings is the sweet characterization of Oboy and Freda and their relationship. So strange and right.
Perhaps the most amazing and moving thing to me is how Oboy's voice handles action--the way the language itself both describes and conveys his inner and outer movements through space. There's nothing like that, the way we stay inside it, that strange traveling.
As my comments suggest, the first 15-20 pages demand a lot of a reader, but once you're in, you're in.
September 21, 2022
It isn’t unreasonable to describe this novel on “cat people” (cats-cum-humans with varying characteristics of either), written to mimic the POV of the more catlike than mannish protagonist, as unreadable, super-silly-billy bollocks. The prose is a frenzied blast of onomatopoeic lunacy, Wake-esque non sequiturs, and clipped nouveau roman-style cat’s eye (ho ho) description, periodically interrupted by more lucid narrative explainers from the less feline characters, unrelentingly swerving across 330 pages where the font expands and contracts to indicate overheard dialogue or the boom of someone speaking in a sensitive feline’s ear. On top of this, the novel is set in a nondescript part of France, with French words and phrases liberally splashed through, although frequent Cockneys, Italians, and Germans inhabit this bizarre world too. Plot-wise, there’s outsider cats in packs trying to liberate household pets from their human captors, and some cat people are nicer than others. That’s your novel. And if you can’t admire the sheer ballsiness of this enterprise, the commitment to a truly bonkers prose style clearly the product of a strange, unwavering passion, then you’re probably a very beige halfwit.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews