Open Throat

March 1, 2023
A wild male cougar is the unlikely protagonist of this fascinating story, narrated by the cougar himself. He lives in a thicket in Hollywood's Beachwood Canyon. One of the hikers there--a bulky man with a whip--captures his attention. He will see the man again when he sets fire to a homeless encampment. The resulting blaze engulfs the canyon, driving the cougar out of the park into a nearby neighborhood where he winds up in the basement of a house. The girl who lives there discovers him and improbably treats him as a pet. When her father discovers this, the girl and the cougar flee in her car (!). Stopped by traffic, the cougar sees the thick man yet again, discovers he can open the car door, and, well, things get sticky. Hoke does a fine job with his highly imaginative material, bringing the cougar to vivid life by giving him a fascinating take on the human world and his place in it. Open Throat is a treat for both animal lovers and anyone who appreciates innovative fiction.

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April 3, 2023
Hoke (The Book of Endless Sleepovers) gives voice to a Los Angeles cougar in his playful latest. Its provocative opening line sets the tone: “I’ve never eaten a person but today I might.” The narrator admits they don’t understand people, observing a group of hikers engaged in what the reader will recognize as a BDSM scenario involving a couple and a man dressed as Indiana Jones. During the day, the cougar hides unnoticed under the Hollywood sign. After dark, they venture into town. Their concerns are immediate—hunger, thirst, survival. Their relationship to their environment is sensual, with sights of running mice, the taste of a possum, or the sound of footsteps. The cougar longs for community, and Hoke sketches them as a quintessential outsider as a fire forces them out of their haunt and they form a surprising bond with a girl they call “little slaughter.” The economical prose reads like poetry, with enjambment in place of punctuation and frequent paragraph breaks. By turns funny and melancholy, this is a thrilling portrait of alienation. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review used the incorrect pronoun to refer to the novel's narrator.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
A mountain lion ekes out a lonely existence below the Hollywood sign in this singular, stunning novel. The narrator of Hoke's fifth book (after the memoir Sticker) cannot share the name his mother gave him because "it's not made of noises a person can make," but it might be fair to refer to him as P-22. That puma, to whom the book is movingly dedicated, lived in Los Angeles' Griffith Park from 2012 to 2022 and was the subject of much adoration and occasional concern. Driven from where he was born by a violent and territorial father, Hoke's leonine protagonist is forced to brave the highway that he refers to as "the long death" to survive. That tenacious act strands him on the other side, however, and forces him to make a life defined by his proximity to humans rather than his fellow big cats. As he overhears hikers in conversation, recognizes a shared queerness with men having a covert tryst, and comes to care for the unhomed people camping in the park and an aspiring teenage witch, the mountain lion makes sense of who he is and finds an indelible place in readers' hearts. Hoke's prose is a joy, as it alternatingly charms with malapropisms (as when the cougar wonders what a "scare city mentality" is) and stuns with poetic simplicity ("a father to a kitten is an absence / a grown cat to a father is a threat"). Compassionate, fierce, and bittersweet, this is an unforgettable love letter to the wild.

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