The Dominant Animal

A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young writer.

In The Dominant Animal – Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection –compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters – human and animal – eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another. With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence – and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open – rather than tie – up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says – and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.