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.
The mountain lion’s only knowledge of the world comes through snatches of human conversation. Helicopters are always “fucking helicopters”, interrupting TikTokable hikes. A therapist is “something I want”, say the city-dwellers, not realising a carnivore with very similar feelings is watching from not so far away. The lion is thirsty, lonely, deeply yet courteously hungry (“I probably wouldn’t eat a child”).
Open Throat begins as a sly parable for how 21st-century America – and especially queer-baiting, rainbow-washing 21st-century Hollywood – domesticates, commodifies, defangs and ultimately erases queerness. It ends as something wilder, a wide-ranging portrait of technology-fuelled, lucre-gorged loneliness in an uncaring, self-congratulatory liberal city obsessed with fame and ignorant of its own ecological and social breakdown. The writing is so sinuous, so wry and muscular, yet with a padding, pawing playfulness, that you’re ready to go anywhere Hoke wants to take you.
In movies, lions are virile, caucasian-coded lawgivers and saviours: think of Aslan, Simba, even Leo the MGM mascot. And it’s a classic white male protagonist – the hardbitten noir detective, with his capacity for sudden violence and atavistic moral code – that our main character reinvents. Who better to delve into Tinseltown’s human frailties, self-deceptions and hatreds than a 100lb starving cougar?
“I’m old because I’m not dead,” the lion says, but “I can’t eat everything I’m afraid of.” That voice – simultaneously innocent, world-weary, human, alien, queer in all the senses of the word – is the book. There’s a beautiful sequence where a voyeuristically observed Grindr hook-up is contrasted with the death of our hero’s long-gone partner, their “kill sharer”.
The novel intersperses memories of a violent, vanished past (mother “was very kind / her bloodthirst was insatiable”, “a grown cat to a father is a threat”) with the lion’s journey. It travels from a temporary home at a torched homeless encampment into the city proper, where there is nowhere to hide, and not a street corner that hasn’t been immortalised in all its cruelty and caprice.
A new home is found in the basement of a celebrity comedian’s moody teenage daughter. Jane, who is a bit of a witch, renames our lion “Hecate”, her “emotional support goddess”. In turn Jane becomes “little slaughter”. Complications ensue. It’s a Disney film on acid.
Hoke grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. After the 2017 terrorist car attack, reactions to that fact, as he writes in his memoir Sticker, went from “So you’re like, southern”, to “You weren’t there, though, right?” The sleepy college town became the focus of tiki-torched neo-Confederate vehicular femicide – arranged first as choreographed recruiting spectacle, then transformed into a horrifying tragedy pieced together from a thousand cellphone fragments. Open Throat similarly dramatises its own mythology of US violence – starting with our lion’s father attempting to murder them in noble, operatic combat in the Santa Monica mountains; moving down across “the long death” of the highway; on to hungry, dirty kills of rabbits for much-needed sustenance; and to man cruelly, senselessly, immolating man in the City of Angels.
This is a clever, witty conceit, cleverly, wittily executed. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking and nail-bitingly propulsive, with an exquisite Hitchcockian climax. You can even forgive Hoke the recent US novelistic habit of refusing to call Trump by his name. Hecate is an apex predator, after all; what can they possibly know about the Republican party?
• Open Throat by Henry Hoke is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
