Inspiration and Influence: The Sounds, Words & Real-Life Lion Behind Open Throat
Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat, our August Book of the Month, shares the the forces that shaped his genre-defying novel, told from the perspective of a gay mountain lion.
The real-life mountain lion P-22
P-22 was the beloved and iconic mountain lion of Los Angeles, who lived in Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills for 10 years. In a eulogy for the famous lion, Beth Pratt writes, ‘I look at Griffith Park through the window again and feel the loss so deeply. Whenever I hiked to the Hollywood sign, or strolled down a street in Beachwood Canyon to pick up a sandwich at The Oaks, or walked to my car after a concert at the Greek Theater, the wondrous knowledge that I could encounter P-22 always propelled me into a joyous kind of awe. And I am not alone — his legion of stans hoped for a sight of Hollywood’s most beloved celebrity, the Brad Pitt of the cougar world, on their walks or on their Ring cams, and when he made an appearance, the videos usually went viral. In perhaps the most Hollywood of P-22’s moments, human celebrity Alan Ruck, star of Succession, once reported seeing P-22 from his deck, and shouting at him like a devoted fan would.’
A fleeting lyric from Nick Cave’s ‘Hollywood’
Now Hoke didn’t specify the lyric, but we can only assume it’s one from the following verse, that anthropomorphises a cougar in ‘the hills’:
I’m gonna buy me a house up in the hills
With a tear-shaped pool and a gun that kills
Cause they say there is a cougar that roams these parts
With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart
That she is white and rare and full of all kinds of harm
And stalks the perimeter all day long
But at night lays trembling in my arms
Balam Acab Wander/Wonder album
Wander / Wonder is the 2011 debut album by electronic musician and producer Balam Acab, capturing a dreamy and ethereal soundscape.
Susan Steinberg
Susan Steinberg is the author of four books of fiction: Machine, Spectacle, Hydroplane, and The End of Free Love. With a predisposition for bending traditional storytelling conventions, her lyrical and fragmented prose often blurs the lines between prose and poetry. Steinberg’s writing explores identity, alienation, and the complexities of human relationships, themes keenly felt in Hoke’s Open Throat.
Katherine Faw
Katherine Faw is the author of Ultraluminous, named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, BOMB, and Vulture, and Young God, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and also named a best book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, The Houston Chronicle, BuzzFeed, and more. An author fearlessly tackling the gritty underbelly of contemporary society, she explores the lives of marginalized individuals with sharp prose and dark lyricism.
