The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan
“Smells of mud and manure were coming through the open windows - the first whiffs of spring. When I went outside, the wind began to blow. It was coming from a long way off with nothing to stop it. It turned me around. It opened my mouth. It undid my hair and lifted my skirt. It scattered me just like I liked.”
The Dominant Animal (2020) by Kathryn Scanlan is a captivating and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition across forty concise stories. The tragicomic narratives that the collection is filled with cover human failure, loss, and a certain sense of existentialism. Often bordering on fable-like, fairytale horror genres, there is much left unsaid, with readers left to consider their own moral takeaways.
Most of the stories are told in the first person, but there are a few that are narrated to us, and it’s hard not to imagine some discompassionate voice observing and describing the character's fates, as in ‘Men of the Woods’:
“His grandmother was very old, and his mother was sick from her life, so they sat tethered in a blue spell on the sofa. The thin boy lay on the floor between them while the television jumped and shouted.”
Relationships with others and animals are a crucial theme explored throughout, often blurring the boundaries between the two, and the inhumanity humans can inflict on both. In ‘Shh’, our narrator is being prepped for surgery as the surgeon recounts how he tried to remove a mouse infestation using glue traps. To free the mice, caught but still alive in the traps, the surgeon uses his scalpel with unsuccessful results. The story ends with our narrator falling under the spell of anaesthetic to a chilling realisation:
“Over my face, his gloved hand hung - you could even say it twitched. Then, with his fingertips, he pushed the lids of my eyes shut. You’ve seen this move before - some man, overcome with shame, unable, for selfish reasons, to look at what he’s done.”
Men are depicted in similar ways throughout the book, acting without thought or care for the consequences to those around them. There’s no moralising from Scanlan on this issue, simply a presentation of ‘these are the facts’. In ‘Fable’, a young girl is abandoned by her mother and so marries the local Butcher, who it is implied has already had eyes on her. Finding the girl to be uncompliant, the Butcher keeps her outside in a yard with his old dog:
“He blackened the girl, too, but she was less malleable than he’d hoped, so he kept her out back with the dog while he sawed bones and clasped hands in his immaculate shop, his white teeth testimony enough for any who might ask.”
We know the girl is being abused, and in this subtle sentence, Scanlan reminds us of the complicit nature that often surrounds abuse. It also reminds me of an essay by Rebecca Solnit titled ‘Nobody Knows’, where she compares the stories of nobodies and somebodies – the nobodies typically women like the girl, low in society, and how a nobody’s story doesn’t matter if it relates to a somebody. Fables are typically moralistic stories featuring animals, and while dogs feature in this one, the twisting of the narrative and violent ending will leave you thinking.
Complicated maternal relationships, the haunting capacity of small children, and visceral physical experiences are all explored with the same barely-scratching-the-surface level of emotional intensity. The lack of emotive quality in writing aids the reading experience, as we’re confronted with the tiny shocks of realisation about what is happening versus how it is presented to us.
This is definitely not a reading experience for everyone. Scanlan surpasses kitschy surrealism and ventures into darker territory. Fans of Samanta Schweblin, Marina Enriquez, and Carmen Maria Machado will find much to enjoy in these pages.
The stories in this collection hold to the structural characteristics of flash fiction, although the term flash’ implies a fleeting encounter with the story encompassing a single snapshot of an experience. Scanlan’s stories, while individual narratives, merge to create an alternative world in which these stories exist. This is flash writing at its finest, leaving readers to ponder the intense ambiguity of the central messages at the heart of the collection.
Scanlan enticingly invites us to consider who is really the dominant animal - and at what cost?
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
