Doctor Rat

Doctor Rat is a laboratory animal who has survived so many experiments that his mind has broken open, and he has responded by becoming management. From his cage he addresses the reader in the voice of an enthusiastic scientific administrator, explaining the value of the maze, the electrode and the vivisection table, cheerfully assuring his fellow prisoners that death is freedom and that dissent is a hygiene problem. Outside the laboratory, something is stirring: the animals of the world, whales and dogs and elephants and mice, have begun to hear one another and to gather, and the book cuts from Doctor Rat's briefing notes to the gathering itself, told in the voices of the creatures moving towards it. Kotzwinkle alternates the two registers relentlessly, the collaborator's jargon against the plainest possible accounts of what is being done, and refuses to soften either. It is a short novel and a savage one, a satire on scientific rationalisation that reads as a howl, and its final movement is among the bleakest things fantasy has produced. Anyone expecting whimsy from the author of E.T.'s novelisation will not find it here.