Genre: Cat Snacks and Comebacks
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Bowie is back in Philadelphia and making a life for himself. New job, comfortable apartment, his family nearby. He’s fine without Smith. Just fine. At least, he was fine until he came home from work to find the man who broke his heart waiting in his apartment. Asking for a favor. No apologies for months of silence. Bowie doesn’t owe Smith anything. He should protect his own heart. He ought to keep far away from Smith. Never touch him again. Definitely not share a bed and pretend they’re in love.
Smith isn’t fine. He’s not sure he ever has been. Maybe there’s something wrong with him, something that makes it impossible for people to care about him. There are only two people he loves enough to go out of his way for, and one of them is about to get married. His sister wants him at her wedding, and she wants to see him happy. Not telling her about his breakup is coming back to bite him in the ass. Pretending he and Bowie are still together is a tiny white lie. Who could it hurt … other than Smith?
The Review
Bowie, a college student, is all but assaulted by a man with a gun—his “scary dude neighbor.” The demand: take care of my cat or I’ll kill you. There’s more to it than that, because it’s also sort of funny, and weirdly romantic. There is no violence, but apparently the scary neighbor dude does something, um, difficult for work. The author is the narrator through Bowie’s feckless college boy eyes. They do a good job of it. I was impressed immediately.
Bowie graduates and moves away, without any sense that “Smith” (as he calls the neighbor during the years they’re taking care of the cat together) cares. Then, one day, Smith shows up again out of the blue with another demand: be his plus-one for his little sister’s wedding in Pittsburgh.
We learn a lot, but not everything. The author conveys what’s important without dressing it up at all. I won’t say that Smith’s mysterious work doesn’t bother me throughout, but the story distracts us from that an onto more important things. I really can’t talk about it more because the story is only 25 pages. It moved me unexpectedly. And then there’s the cat.
An oddly perfect short story, much darker and deeper than its whimsical cover led me to believe.
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
