Kassten Alonso, The Pet Thief, Fiction Collective 2, 2013.
The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science,
rebellion, humankind’s inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and
survival in a post-human world.
When scientists,
the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans
with animals—cats, specifically—for organ harvesting, drug testing, and
military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure,
producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless
fundamentally defective.
Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.
Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.
Oboy is unable to think or speak
except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda’s
mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to “rescue”
every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first
solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come
unraveled.
Kassten Alonso, Core: A Romance, Hawthorne Books, 2005.
This intense and compact novel crackles with obsession, betrayal, and
madness, and is an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. As the
narrator becomes fixated on his best friend’s girlfriend his precarious
hold on sanity rapidly deteriorates into delusion and violence. This
story can be read as the classic myth of Hades and Persephone (Core)
rewritten for a twenty-first century audience as well as a dark,
foreboding tale of unrequited love and loneliness. Alonso skillfully
uses language to imitate memory and psychosis putting the reader
squarely inside the narrator’s head. In addition, deliberate misuse of
standard punctuation blurs the distinction between the narrator’s
internal and external worlds. A sense of alienation and Faulknerian
grotesquerie permeate this landscape where desire is borne in the bloom
of a daffodil and sanity lies toppled like an applecart in the mud.
Kassten Alonso’s first novel Core: A Romance was an Oregon Book Awards finalist in 2005. He has previously published in the Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, and The Oregonian, and was a contributor to Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon's Sesquicentennial Anthology, A Merging of Past and Present Oregon Voices and Stories. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, author Monica Drake, and daughter, Mavis.
