OPEN THROAT | Henry Hoke
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OPEN THROAT |
Henry Hoke
2023
Pan Macmillan
“I can’t sing
my lungs are full of ugly
I look down and there are no paws
any sec I could step off a cliff
I think I’ve always felt this way
the smoke makes it clear” — Henry Hoke, Open Throat 2023
We are in Los Angeles, or ellay as our narrator calls it. Strong, ferocious, and foul-mouthed, they often get things not quite right—whether it’s the name of the city whose hills are its home or the bits of wisdom it picks from passing urban hikers. Though it may misunderstand from time to time, its reflections are often humorous, profound, and even moving. Anyway, they have good reason to get human things wrong.
Our narrator is a cat.
They know they’re a cat because that’s what the people they overhear say:
“the older man in the left tent calls me puma
the couple in the middle tent call me ley own
the young man in the right tent calls me a different name every day but it always ends with cat
fucker cat or shitfuck cat or goddamn fuck cat”
Open Throat by American author Henry Hoke, and it is written from the perspective of an urban wildcat. Our mountain lion narrator is queer and uses they/them pronouns, adding extra dimensions to the big cat’s marginalisation in the City of Angels. Open Throat offers us a fresh view of a vaguely futuristic Los Angeles and its inhabitants, one told through multiple identities and perspectives. The novel can be read through the lens of Queer Futurism; an emerging genre that centres queer identities and experiences, subverts heteronormative storytelling, and reimagines transformation. Playing with gender, sexuality, and identity in creative ways, Henry Hoke foretells a “genderqueer future for us all”, one which he considers “the truth of humanity”.1
Open Throat is inspired by the true story of P22, the mountain lion discovered living in the Griffith Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles and who rose to celebrity in 20122. A rare photograph of P22 under the iconic Hollywood Sign and the story of this big cat in a comparatively small urban park habitat captured the public’s imagination, including that of author and neighbour Henry Hoke.
Photograph by Steve Winter, National Geographic Collection (2013)
This slim and sparse novel presents a non-human or more-than-human perspective on social, urban, and environmental change. It is a portrayal of humanity told from outside ourselves, laying bare the absurdity of our societies with humour and pathos.
Our narrator is compassionate yet ruthless, tender yet savage, wise yet naïve, seeing and understanding more than one might expect from an apex predator. “fire is the only future … what person would walk into a scorched world”, asks our narrator. It’s a good question, and a prophetic one in the context of climate change. Our visions of the future are a matter of perspective, as this novel and big cat remind us.
Further reading, listening, viewing
Open Throat by Henry Hoke, macmillian publishers, 2023
‘He changed us’: the remarkable life of celebrity mountain lion P-22’, Catherine Gammon, The Guardian (2022)
‘Open Throat by Henry Hoke review – inside the mind of a queer mountain lion’, Rahul Raina, The Guardian, 2023
‘Open Throat, the apocalyptic novel About a queer lion lost in LA,’ Patrick Sproull, AnOther Magazine, 2023
