... deeply enjoyable ... Sometimes the stories work within the territory of the horror genre – they are atmospheric with fear and shock, threat and disorientation – but without the generic appurtenances of the supernatural ... Almost all the stories are told in the first person, but some give the unnerving impression of having come out of a non-human consciousness ... The pieces are set in unidentified places that seem very much like the US – the rural midwest or the suburbs of the great cities. Yet the settings feel fresh because the author refuses to draw on worn-out descriptive tropes ... This is not realism, but there is no dream fog about these stories. There is no kitsch, no irony, no postmodern nods and winks, no sentiment either. Through the power of her vision, Scanlan takes hold of the world and gives it to the reader with an intensity that is, paradoxically, both strange and familiar ... The stories are not flashes of fiction or experiments but carefully made works, executed with powerful economy. Scanlan pays minute attention to objects and persons, to construct stories that are exactly as long as they need to be. The emotional power is achieved, at points, partly through an ambiguous narration of events, which may frustrate readers who prefer their stories to lie flat. Conventions of dialogue, action and closure are eschewed, not as a provocation, but because this is the most engaging and convincing way the writer has found to reach this far into what it is to be human ... Scanlan requires that the reader remain sharply vigilant: a feeling that lingers long after finishing the book and will, perhaps, be part of what draws people back. On rereadings I found the stories to be both more beautiful on the surface, with finely made sentences that are sonically and rhythmically compelling, and more profoundly affecting at a deeper level of feeling. More evident still becomes Scanlan’s skill in exploring big human themes: grief, abjection, neglect, fragility ... a great source of pleasure.
Lean and mean – whittled down to their very viscera – the 40 stories assembled in The Dominant Animal are certainly close to the bone ... Scanlan seems to proceed not by addition but subtraction, like a sculptor chipping away at a slab of marble ... Scanlan’s fiction never strays far from this point of origin that always threatens to reclaim it, as in this mystifying coup de théâtre ... The young American author’s audacious deployment of lacunae is a measure of her singular artistry ... The author’s focus on this scattered self and life stripped back to its essence does not result in a defamiliarisation of the world but, on the contrary, in its refamiliarisation – as though we were emerging from a coma. It also lends these tales a timeless quality, enhanced by a style that tends to the irrefutable. These are sentences written in stone – to be read out loud or learned by heart.
Scanlan’s stories are the opposite of traditional, New Yorker–style fiction. She favors situations rather than plots, and is fond of first-person narrators who withhold interiority. There’s scant character development, and no grand epiphanies. Her pieces don’t end so much as stop in their tracks, leaving the reader with the muddled buzz of bad weed. They’re also compact—the longest runs about six pages. The acoustics of language are central ... her work offers its own canted mix of eroticism and absurdism, its own gnarled comedy of gender and class ... At their best, her stories make other writers’ work seem fatty and uptight ... The party line of most realist fiction is specificity, not uncertainty. Scanlan, however, is an artist of omission ... These lacunae and non sequiturs are thrilling in some stories. In others, Scanlan underplays her hand ... For all the variety of their predicaments, Scanlan’s narrators also speak with the same measured neuroticism. The book sometimes feels like a single, visceral monologue, albeit one you’re happy to prolong ... To her credit, Scanlan treats the reader like a collaborator capable of keeping pace with sudden reroutes ... Scanlan’s stories tell you almost nothing—which, in these cacophonous times, is the mark of a true radical.
In her debut story collection, Kathryn Scanlan’s short, experimental fictions decontextualize, shock, and remain linguistically inventive ... Scanlan’s attention to the minutiae of the sentence is immediately apparent in her short, experimental fictions. The wiry language is textured and cutting ... The precision in Scanlan’s prose renders her objects alien and strange, and the strangeness opens them up to greater scrutiny ... These widowed images, shaped by Scanlan’s markedly unique prose, often come together to create something abrasive, unexpected, and shocking ... Scanlan’s stories of defamiliarized people, places, and actions are a part of this extended lineage, a literature of the object. She is a writer who disposes of the forest for the trees ... We are all the more at the mercy of writers like Scanlan who provide new ways of seeing what has already been seen.
Each [story] is a perplexing little jolt that leaves one wondering if there really is anything that makes us better than the creatures we keep ... every scant word is precise and brutal ... This sense of metamorphosis, combined with the fact that no technology is mentioned throughout, gives her stories a timeless, fable-esque quality ... These stories often end abruptly, before you can fully understand what is going on, and do not offer satisfying endings. Traditionally, a fable would deliver a moral, but no lesson is forthcoming here ... enigmatic, unsettling and tinged with body horror; funny, cruel and minutely repulsive in places. But they are also cinematic, with strange images that are as ephemeral as they are memorable ... This is a brilliant, unsettling collection of quick, sharp and searing stories that asks the reader how humane humanity actually is — a particularly apt question in our newly strange world.
Scanlan’s writing is such stripped back, bare-bones stuff, it makes Raymond Carver’s work seem positively baroque ... In some ways it is refreshing to read a book so lacking in adornment; Scanlan has no choice but to get straight to the point. There are no lengthy asides. No flowery descriptive passages. All the words that have made it through her ruthless cutting process are one hundred percent necessary ... And yet. While The Dominant Animal could hardly be accused of being ‘too much’, it would be just as fair to label it ‘not enough’. Brevity may have benefits, but it also has a cost ... doesn’t even seem like a collection of stories; it’s more like a collection of writer’s prompts. Very few of them have any kind of narrative arc. There’s little characterisation – only a handful of the characters even have names. Some – the best ones – read like parables. Others simply show us a place – usually a nightmarish version of a suburbia – and/or an event – often cruel, or sinister – then finish as soon as they have started. Although many have some bite to them, many are full of poetry, it’s never quite enough, somehow. You’re always left thinking, ‘Is that it?' ... There’s nothing wrong with the prose itself – Scanlan’s writing is crisp, clean and often evocative. It’s only that when you finish each of her stories, the feeling that you get isn’t one of magic, or shock, or even satisfaction. The feeling that you get is…‘huh.’ And then you turn the page and read another one, and then another, and after you’ve gotten through a few, it’s hard to remember a pertinent detail about any one of them. Perhaps if Scanlan had chosen her best ten and developed them more, The Dominant Animal would have done a better job of satisfying the hungry reader.
... will surely be a new reference point for flash fiction ... in the same way that Hemingway relies on the reader to fill in the blanks, Scanlan offers us a litany of lacunae within which our own imagination can take flight ... Scanlan’s work invites a similar sense of distrust and disorientation. Scenes from what feels like a dream dance across the page: a series of tableaux – some beautiful, others horrifying – are burned into the mind’s eye ... a Gothic house of horrors; open any of the doors inside and you will find something to marvel at, but you will probably also wish you hadn’t seen it.
Kathryn Scanlan writes sentences so delicious that you want to roll them around your mouth like an expensive chocolate. Each of the pristine, compact stories in her debut collection, The Dominant Animal, links one ingenious grammatical construction to another in a chain of virtuosic prose. Scanlan follows in the tradition of earlier meticulous sentence-crafters such as Diane Williams, Barry Hannah, and Gary Lutz, employing a self-conscious, stylized mode of expression that is especially attendant to the sounds of words and juxtaposition and that is, above all, concerned with the avoidance of clichés and all well-worn phrases. All writers revise, naturally—and revise, and revise, and revise—but reading The Dominant Animal one gets the sense that every sentence has been worked over and polished to an extreme degree ... could be read in a couple hours, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are forty stories packed in here, and they take time to digest. It’s almost as if each one needs to be read first for the pure physical pleasure of Scanlan’s language, and a second time to get at what she is intending to convey through the characters and situations described ... At times the book seems to present itself as a fanatical experiment in proving that you are what you eat. And the frequent unflinching references to the digestive system’s rude conclusions imply a darkly realistic perspective on where an obsession with the fleeting joys of consumption will lead you ... While a hardcore animal-rights activist might seek to prove to you how animals are like people, Scanlan shows how people are like animals ... With their bizarre scenarios, vibrant imagery, and insightful metaphors, the stories in The Dominant Animal operate as exquisite specimens of high literary art. If they falter, it is in their habitual refusal to let us into the minds of their characters ... In the effort to create one startlingly precise turn of phrase after another while bowling the reader over with the potency of her metaphors, Scanlan too often overlooks the internal, necessarily prosaic grappling with life that gives characters dimension. She leaves us on the outside of these characters, looking at them the same we way look at our pets, asking ourselves, 'What are they thinking now?'
You will read in a flash and say, 'What was that?' ... The theme of this collection: What twist is the author going to stick in her tale this time? Most of the stories do not cohere. They start one place and end up somewhere completely different. Many last paragraphs appear to have been lifted from another story ... The reader does not care what happens in many of the tales, even in tragedy ... The stories do not fail because of their length. Many authors, notably Lydia Davis, write short cryptic tales, say something interesting, make the reader care about the characters ... A reader of Scanlan’s work can understand why each story has been published in renowned journals. They are small hors d’oeuvres, they go down in a flash, some are ticklish, some are treacly, some are spicy, but few are memorable. To have 40 different pieces over the course of an evening is not the recipe for a delicious repast ... readers will relish the author’s unique observations, and there are many.
Scanlan craftily makes the stuff of everyday life seem strange and rare in this collection ... Scanlan has a knack for subtly bending the ordinary into the uncanny ... This is a delightful, mischievous, and mysterious collection that’s perfect for fans of Lydia Davis and Mary Ruefle.
This lightning-fast vision means that Scanlan jettisons traditional story elements in favor of tone and image, which are almost always disquieting ... Readers with a high tolerance for ambiguity will find much to admire in these fleeting pieces.
