The Dominant Animal

'A brilliant, unsettling collection of quick, sharp & searing stories that asks the reader how humane humanity actually is a particularly apt question in our newly strange world.' -- Financial Times 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. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. In these forty very short stories, the ordinary shifts into the uncanny: in living rooms and in hotel rooms, on suburban lawns and on the surgeon s chair, characters human and animal eat, breathe, provoke and injure one another. Grandmothers sit tethered to the couch in a blue spell, lonesome men crouch among thorny shrubs, pets expire slowly or suddenly, and the nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. No mercy, a character says and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful. 'These are sentences written in stone to be read out loud or learned by heart.' -- Irish Times 'In these flawless, gripping, beautiful stories Kathryn Scanlan gives us a picture of life s true uneasy heart.' -- David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On 'The Dominant Animal left me feeling uneasy, off-balance and immeasurably better for having read it.'-- Julia Armfield, author of salt slow 'Elegantly spare yet exhilarating... A startling, arresting debut.' -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time 'I read The Dominant Animal in a single sitting and finished it hungry for more of the mercurial, singular, surprising magic Kathryn Scanlan is creating.' -- Megan Nolan 'All of life s absurdities and violences are here, dressed up and pulsing with an inimitable energy and intellect that sticks.' -- Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland