Book Review: "The Dominant Animal" by Kathryn Scanlan

I have read some pretty uncomfortable books in my time, including the infamous short story collection entitled "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk. I've read a lot of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Paul Tremblay and Shirley Jackson. Well, if you took Virginia Woolf's writing style, mixed it with the unease of Stephen King's tension narratives and then reduced the size to a short story and blended in some body horror and psychological distress a la Daphne Du Maurier, you're going to end up with this book by Kathryn Scanlan - "The Dominant Animals". A nod to the culture of the plain uncomfortable, this book is written in the most realist and ordinary of ways. Kind of like what would happen if Hemingway and Bret Easton Ellis made some kind of collaboration (but alas, Hemingway did not live that long). Here is a professional life tip for all of you: make sure you’re not eating anything whilst reading this book. You’re going to have a hard time keeping it in afterwards.

“The Dominant Animals” is a book of short stories, each containing some strangely ordinary situation, each turning into the animalistic impulses of the characters involved, including the narrator of the story. From what we think is very normal to the plain absurd, it does not take Kathryn Scanlan long to get introspective and really messed up. For example: a couple do not throw things out but simply let grass grow over the things by laying the rubbish in the garden. After a while ‘they’ come - we do not know who or what ‘they’ are but I think we have to assume they are mice since these people practically live in their own filth. The couple set to killing them and then, set to poisoning them by feeding them things that will let them die slowly. These ‘things’ then crawl into the walls to die and from every angle and place, the sound of their dead bodies rattling can be heard. I can honestly say that this is one of the lighter stories. One that really makes you think is called “Playhouse” - it is not disturbing as you think it is, but it really does let you contemplate about family dynamics inside and outside the family home. The difference between what is portrayed and what is seen by others really makes you question all your neighbours and their lives too. The answer is really that nobody is always happy all the time and this story will definitely show you that in the strangest and yet, most ordinary way possible.

Like when the soldier throws himself from the window in a fit of PTSD in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”, like when Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen dies in the tragedy “Absalom! Absalom!”, Kathryn Scanlan is able to show us something extraordinary and rather uncomfortable happening in a very regular situation - an apparent realism. This is the way it happens in reality, there is nothing extraordinary about it except for the act itself. The circumstances can be as ordinary as the everyday.

The writing style is bleak, often shredded with contemplation upon the human mind, body and sometimes even the habits of the human being observed. From over-eating to dog killing dog, from love to death and back again, Kathryn Scanlan hits the nail on the head every single time and does not rest in her depiction of animalistic horror as the next step in our genres and sub-genres which at the moment are evolving and becoming anew. This book has really stepped up the game in terms of what is scary and disturbing, what is realist and what can or cannot be talked about when it comes to what humans are capable of in the everyday.