The Pet
Kris Fox
Reviewed by Vicky Gilpin
Posted June 21, 2011
Confronting one's own mortality comes in many forms. For some, it is seeing the first wrinkle. For others, it is when friends and loved ones face illness and death. For Sunshine, a symbol of her mortality is a single white hair. Some women would shoo dark thoughts aside or rush out for some chemical help from dear Miss Clairol. For Sunshine, however, ruminations of mortality run fast and furious. Although she sees --or has been trained to see-- herself as another of the faceless masses whose members live unremarkable lives, her youthful dreams have a fragile and brittle quality; her hopes are like shards of ice that tremble when touched with breath. Her intuitive/empathic nature allows her to see the profundity, the sublime, and the degradation of humanity, and sometimes that knowledge is more than one person can bear.
Sunshine never asked to be anyone's salvation, nor did she emerge one morning from her isolation choosing to become someone's victim, but events have a way of happening despite one's best intentions. She was hunted, cornered--- then a hunter more fearsome than her potential assaulters could ever have dreamed stepped in to rescue her. Caleb can be termed a vampire, but the term does not encompass the reality of his existence; he is no B-horror movie villain in a cape or a reanimated corpse. Caleb has his own agenda, and it never included entwining his fate with that of a woman named Sunshine. However, his cyclic existence of hunting the hunters while the hunters hunt him has been skewed: He is compelled to keep Sunshine safe despite this disruption to both of their lives and personalities. Meanwhile, his analysis of his own motivations leave him confused; he has feelings for Sunshine that he doesn't understand, feeling they are more than that of a hyper- evolved being towards a pet, an idea demonstrated by Adam, a hunter's, perspective about and actions toward his own pet. In addition, Sunshine has to reconcile her self- perceptions with the reality of the savior-murderer in whose company she is thrust.
This multi-perspective and multi-historic narrative winds through themes of victimization, duty versus emotional needs, the apparent truths at the core of mythological fears, a person or creature's "nature," familial ties, and the dangers of closeness, either with another being or within one's own mind. This is dark, but many parts of it are beautiful. The reader must be aware that this narrative, or-more accurately- these narratives, demonstrate an uncommon prose form that rejects the slickness, the bluntness, of many modern works. Instead, readers must be prepared for a work that may resonate with fans of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, or the intricacy of Montaigne's speculations.
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