Glacia Errata, No. 82

One: First Life

A new book out last week that I love and highly recommend to you is S. E. Smith’s All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture that Fears Mourning. As I mentioned in my blurb for the book, it’s one of those titles I’ve been waiting for, that moves from the entry point of the loss of a beloved pet to larger questions about mourning and grief.

You can read an excerpt here at Flytrap, a really great publication that S. E. also co-edits.

I can’t recommend it enough; go out and grab yourself a copy.

Two: Lives 2-4

Along similar lines, perhaps a bit morbid but still I think fascinating, is Paul Koudounaris’s Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion. Like all of Paul’s books, it’s thoroughly illustrated with some amazing images that highlight a really fascinating aspect of human culture—how we deal with the death of our pets and what that means. It’s a great document of the material and visual aspects of faith, belief, and grief, one that brings to light a wide range of idiosyncratic and folk beliefs with a great deal of generosity and curiosity.

If you want more on pet cemeteries, long ago I wrote a piece for The Revealer on animal remains in Japan, a review of Barbara R. Ambros’s Bones of Contention: Animal and Religion in Contemporary Japan, which asks to what extent the rise of pet funerals in contemporary Japan was becoming a means of replacing other rituals that were increasingly becoming archaic in a modern society. It’s a fascinating book that asks a series of really interesting questions. While memorials for non-pet animals, for example, are seen as “emblems of Japaneseness and tradition,” Ambros writes, pet memorials are “widely seen as inauthentic, un-Japanese, antisocial, egocentric, and unproductive. They are emblems of consumerism and individualism gone awry.” This review is really dang old (2013!), but you can read it here.

Lastly, on this front, is a great op-ed in the Mississippi Free Press, a great publication I also think is worth supporting.

Three: Lives 5-6

“Nobody will want to read this. It’s too awful.” So thought Stephen King after finishing a draft of the novel that would become Pet Sematary, that he only published to get out of a contractual bind, thinking it would be too much for his readers. He was wrong; as he told NPR in 2024, “And I found out – sort of to my delight and sort of to my horror – that you can't really gross out the American public. You can't go too far.”

Pet Sematary remains my favorite King novel in a way, and the one I’m most likely to return to—despite its really shabby use of the whole “Indian burial ground” cliche that I discussed in Ghostland (excerpted here if you want to check that out), as well as the rather problematic ableism that runs through it. But the way it handles the death of a cat and the death of a child are really unsettling in fascinating ways. It’s a book that deals with the sickness of unmanaged grief, and troubles that line between who is and who is not acceptable to mourn. The general consensus is that the novel’s “awfulness” comes from the death of a child, but I think that horror only works in the book because of the way it’s juxtaposed to that of the family cat.

The 1985 film is also pretty legendary, as opposed to the deeply unsatisfying remake of 2019. But the latter gave me occasion to put down a lot of my thoughts about the novel and its adaptations, and this review remains, weirdly, one of my favorite reviews I’ve ever written, despite the fact that the source text was so marginal.

Four: Lives 7-8

Of course, if you want a truly upsetting book about cats, may I direct your attention to the 1984 graphic novel Garfield: His Nine Lives. My brother and I had this book as kids, because, you know, Garfield was all the rage then (Millennials and Gen Z, don’t judge), and this was one of the many Garfield properties out there: an anthology of pieces by creator Jim Davis and illustrated by different artists. Several are very much in the standard vein of Garfield tone and humor: in particular the first two—“Cave Cat” and “The Vikings”—and the last two, which depict contemporary Garfield and a Garfield in the future, “Space Cat.” But the comics in the middle get increasingly far afield, and two of them in particular, scared the fucking hell out of me as a small child.

One, “Lab Animal,” illustrated by Gary Barker and Larry Feintz, involves a cat being used in a top secret government lab and subjected to an unusual—and deeply upsetting—series of tests on genetic mutation. When the cat learns he’s about to be dissected and autopsied, he escapes, and things get stranger from there.

The other, “Primal Self,” also illustrated by Barker and Feintz, along with Jim Clements, is just straight up nightmare fuel. Just what on earth was Davis getting at here, like he just built this insanely successful commercial empire about a fat cat who loved lasagna as much as he hated Mondays, and then decided to absolutely WILD OUT by putting out the most upsetting shit he could imagine? Goddamn it was terrifying.

Five: Ninth Life

One last great book on cats and death is Alexandra West’s forthcoming Scaredy Cats: A Devilish History of Felines in Horror is another book I’m really excited for you to read. If you don’t know Alex’s work, she’s long co-hosted the podcast Faculty of Horror with Andrea Subissati, and has an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of all things horror—to say nothing of a deep and abiding love of all things feline. And this is the perfect melding of these two topics, and a great deal of fun. It’s out next March, and you’ll love it.