Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance

Scott Bradfield is a satirical writer whose favorite theme -- that people (and talking critters) are their own worst enemies -- gets a workout over the course of thirteen stories built on irresistable hooks. "Doggy Love" is told in the form of e-mails exchanged between frustrated lovers on a computer dating service for dogs, interrupted by stray (pun intended) missives from a Russian pornographer, an Asian golddigger, and a perverted cat. "Penguins for Lunch" follows serial philanderer Whistling Pete into the heart of darkness, namely the room at the Crystal Palace Motel used for his regular lunch hour trysts. Dazzle, the world's smartest dog, tries to accept the limits of his less-intellectually-endowed canine family in a utopian community in the woods, and in a later story, has to outwit a team of UCLA researchers, where he's being tortured in the name of science. In the best of the stories, "[Pig] Paradise" speciesist tensions between wolf and pig neighbors escalate into a horrific climax, followed by an ending that's tragic because it suggests that both hope and hatred are equally reflexive actions. Bradfield isn't a subtle writer, and his characters' epiphanies come off more as barroom philosophizing than psychological insight. Bradfield's work at first reminded me of the sort of satirical tales Bruce Jay Friedman was writing in the '60s, and the absurdist scenarios that were Donald Barthelme's specialty, but on picking up Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics) again for the first time in years, I was struck by just how much psychological depth Barthelme gave his "throwaway" characters, and how little Bradfield's have to fall back on by contrast. Bradfield is a writer trying to work his way out of the SF ghetto into the better literary digests like TriQuarterly, but in another unfortunate contrast, I happened to read Hot Animal Love just as I'd started in on the stories in Lucius Shepard's The Jaguar Hunter, and Shepard, an SF writer who did successfully transition from being a "science fiction writer" to being a "writer" -- old snobberies die hard, especially when the dollars are the difference -- writes characters of such depth that you don't just read them, you act them. By contrast, Bradfield is a clever writer whose stories turn on memorable hooks, not memorable characters. Still, Bradfield is a good prose stylist, and he makes his points with wit and economy. Take the poor soul who discovers that heaven looks a lot like the less desirable parts of Philadelphia: "Daniel was sitting on the wooden bleachers with his fellow recruits, many of whom were browsing through smudged, badly mimeographed copies of the Guide to Heavenly Services Instruction Booklet. "Now, if you'll all turn to page three in your booklets," St. Peter told them, "I'll begin by discussing the excellent peer-support counseling program we offer. And those of you who didn't receive a booklet, please try sharing with your neighbors. We seem to be a little short of supplies."