Review of "Bobcat & Other Stories"

Plus my breakup letter to Literary Fiction & its various other names

Photo credit to Tampa Bay Times

For context, keep in mind that this was one of 3 random books that an innocent bystander randomly picked for me at a neighborhood library created from the books locals donated. I had no idea what I was getting, so that was fun 😉.

But upon further research after reading, I discovered that in terms of popular classification, guess where “Bobcat & Other Stories” by Rebecca Lee falls?

• GoodReads: Literary Fiction / Contemporary

• Amazon: Contemporary Literature & Fiction /

• Other top reviewers: “collegiate” & “left me feeling like I read Hemingway”

I now know that these are red flags to me personally that the book is not for me. Not to say it’s a “bad” book, just…not to my tastes.

I don’t use this blog to bash books really; I know too much about the work that goes into making something like this to do that. Yet reading this did inspire some interesting thoughts that I think you’ll enjoy. 😊Now, I’m getting into what I liked, what was (IDK? for me) and why I’m breaking up with Literary Fiction.

What This Book Does Well

Some passages were bizarrely funny, like this one on page 206:

DAVID AND I REALLY did break up, even though he was unaware of it. But without me calling all the time, we never saw each other, except here and there, once or twice a year, by accident. And in the meantime I got married to an old friend named Mark. He ran the Raptor Center in our town, in the black swamps to the west of us, alongside the Cape Fear River. If you looked carefully, he was a wonderful man. He played the harmonica, he had a beard, he was ten years older than me, he was a settled man, and smart and humble, you could trust him never to have an affair or even leave the house too much. I got pregnant right away, which we'd planned. He was not here tonight. He told me to go ahead, that he'd already had dinner at Lesley and Andy's, as if dinner with friends were one of those things you did once, to experience it, and never again.

She has the sort of humor that sneaks up on you; that’s funny almost without trying to be, and I certainly respect that.

Then there are the classically beautiful metaphorical passages too, like in the story on pages 94 - 95 of “Slatland.” Basically, here the main character is a lady who has recently learned that her boyfriend is actually married to another woman and has kids with her in an Eastern European country, a woman he has been secretly trying to bring into Canada to be with him …and all of this behind our main character’s back.

The protagonist learned to disconnect from traumatic/stressful situations by witnessing them “from above” in a place she was told to “visit” by an eccentric Professor. He told her to go “up to Slatland” to gain perspective on things, detach, and regain her mental calm. So, when she finds out about the secret wife of her boyfriend, she dissociates and goes back up to “Slatland,” and in her visualization, this is her revelation:

If I had been able to climb down then, to drop out of Slatland at that moment, everything would have remained simple, and probably Rezvan and I would still be together.

But Slatland seemed to have a will of its own. It would not let me go until I looked down to my right. If I was willing to see the simplicity, the purity, of my own desire, then I also had to see the entire landscape — the way desire rises from every corner and intersects, creates a wilderness over the earth.

I stood on Slatland a long time before I looked down to my right. There it was, Eastern Europe, floating above the Mediterranean. I traced with my finger the outline of Romania. I squinted, down through the mist and mountains, down through the thick moss of trees, until I found her. She stood in a long line of people, her forty-five-kilo children hanging on her skirts. She bent to them and broke for them some bread as hard as stone. I hovered a few feet above her and watched. Even so, I might still have been able to return to my own life, my own province, unchanged if she hadn't turned her face upward right then, as if she had felt some rain, and looked directly at me.

This all happened very fast, in a blink of my eyes. When I opened them, Professor Pine was sitting on his desk, watching me. "You're a real erky-terk," he said, with a tic so extreme that it looked like it might swallow his face. He walked me to the door and handed me the letters, which later that night I would give to Rezvan. We would be standing on the balcony in the semidarkness of the moon, and I would be surprised at how easily they passed through my hands, as easily as water.

And just like that, the story ends as she decides how she’ll break up with him and let it all go. It’s a bit extreme, but the language is certainly poetic, and I appreciate the imagery and meaning in the phrases.

And Yet…

I found myself focusing on all these little details, thinking that they were going to pay off, that they would add up to these big important reveals, but they…mostly didn’t.

For example, in the first story of “The Bobcat,” I fixated on the absurdity of the “Bobcat victim,” which I found morbidly hilarious 😂. I don’t know if that’s what the author intended, but I couldn’t stop obsessing over it, which totally pulled all my focus and empathy and concern away from the main character.

In “The Bobcat,” there is a guest at the protagonist’s dinner party who lost her arm from an incident she had with a wild bobcat, and she wrote a whole memoir about “her harrowing tale of survival” that is now being sold by publisher’s as a big new top-seller.

Now everything the bobcat victim said was so utterly ridiculous that it’s no wonder that they start doubting whether she was even attacked by a real bobcat at all – and honestly, I think she lied.

For example, take this passage from page 28:

The alcohol had left Susan nostalgic for the bobcat and her time on the mountain. "What I missed the most," she said, "while I lay there, aware now that my arm would most likely have to be amputated, if I didn't die right there, going in and out of consciousness, what I missed the most was this, the ritual of dinner, the sitting down to sup together."

Oh my god. I looked over at Lizbet and knew she would repeat "sup together" for the rest of our lives.

"It is written inside us," Susan said, "to have dinner with our friends. As I crouched down, and he breathed at my back, I went through all the great meals of my life, one by one. The fish at the wharf in my childhood, the beef bourguignon in Falstaff, my grandmother's creampuffs, one by one."

"When you say 'bobcat," I said, "are you meaning it metaphorically or actually?"

"Both," Susan said. "I picture it as the fright of your life"

"But when you say 'bobcat' most of us are picturing a really big, ferocious animal."

"And that's fine," she said.

I mean, WTF? 🤔🤨😂

While I was apparently meant to be focused on this drama about spouses cheating on each other and the protagonist’s marriage falling apart…all I could think was:

“If you love to talk about your trauma in that much detail at a dinner party…then you obviously weren’t very fucking traumatized!”

And also…I’ve actually hiked in the Himalayas. I have seen a bobcat in the wild, from a distance.

And they are not highly confrontational animals.

Bobcats are rarely even seen in the daytime, but it was early spring, there was still snow on the ground, and it was probably desperate for food. Still, it was not coming near me and in fact hid from me.

So, let’s consider how many unbelievable things I would have to ignore to believe this bobcat encounter in the midst of a “hyper-realism” story:

1. First, the very idea of some idiotic New York woman having such an epiphany about the “meaninglessness of marriage” that she goes to the mountains around Nepal or some shit…because obviously that would solve all of her problems, right?…ok, maybe like one person in a thousand might do that, but THEN…

2.… that she has an “encounter” with a wild bobcat that ALLOWED her to get close enough to touch it in the first place is so beyond absurd (that does not happen)…

3.…and the fact that she was dumb enough to think that petting a wild animal was a good idea?! (I’m sorry, what kind of bubble did you grow up in? Have you only ever seen the movie Bambi and think all animals in this world are cute and cuddly? Really?)

4…and then that the Bobcat bit her arm & injured her so badly that her arm had to be amputated, so she’s lying there having an out of body experience in the mountains (rather than trying to fucking run away and save her life??!!) — like seriously, if a wild animal did go through all the trouble of attacking you, then why would it stop there? If they need to eat, they’ll just fucking eat you. They’re not going to just take a bite and go on their merry fucking way. Seriously.

Knowing that this one woman apparently wrote this memoir about her “tragic story” to get rich and famous in the publishing world…and I just got so annoyed and sidetracked about that that I couldn’t let it go.

She was simultaneously the most annoying character and yet bizarrely interesting character in the whole story, but we only got a few paragraphs of her. Before moving on to the tragedy of realizing a marriage is falling apart.

But here’s the thing. I’ve met people who write lots of literary and contemporary fiction, and do you know how many times the big reveal is “oh, they’re cheating?”

To me, the faux-bobcat-victim was just far more interesting.

Therefore, here is my break-up letter to Literary Fiction:

Dear Literary Fiction,

I’ve tried for so long to understand you, to accept you as you are, to love you the way I should because all the Creative Writing Professors tell me to, but at this point, I think pretending is only hurting us both.

It’s not you; it’s me.

I love Fantasy too much. I long for the surreal and that which pulls us out of this world and into another, and that’s how I like to see my truths served up to me for breakfast.

To quote Sir Terry Pratchett when asked, “You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?”:

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

[Interviewer]: It’s a rather ghettoized genre…It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Pratchett: Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown…

…This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.”

We were just “expected” to like each other.

At University, they insisted I had to like you, Literary Fiction. They swore that I could only be a genius if I saw all the depths of your wondrous metaphors, but the truth is that I longed for more. A slice of reality depicted poetically …well, it actually bores me after a while. That’s just who I am.

We’d both benefit from seeing other people.

I have been reading more Fantasy behind your back. I’m sorry; I know I should’ve told you, but I was too shy to admit it at first. I’m still discovering new genres I love, like Romanta-Sci-Fi and Horror-Romance!!

You were meant for a certain type of crowd, for people who’ve graduated from an MFA in Creative Writing program, and that’s fine. But I’m sorry; that’s not my crowd.

Actually, every time we were together, I was fantasizing you were someone else.

There, now you can suitably be angry at me, Literary Fiction. That will help you to let me go. The truth is the whole time I was reading you, I was hoping that a dragon might pop out from somewhere between the pages and turn the whole thing into magic realism.

We’ve grown apart.

We want different things. You want to get recognized with Pulitzer Prize awards and have people argue about what your ending meant or if it even had an ending. I want TO UNDERSTAND THE BOOK. Because you see, I’ve been in enough writer’s workshops to know that sometimes authors just make up random shit and write it down without ever knowing what it means in the hopes that someone in their audience will turn it into a profound meaning of their own, which the author can then take credit for as if they’d intended that all along. I’ve seen behind this curtain, so no, the ambiguity does NOT strike me as a brilliant move anymore. I’ve seen too much. I’m sorry – maybe that’s not you at all, but you see? This is why we weren’t meant for each other.

Goodbye, Literary Fiction.

We are better off as friends, or casual acquaintances…and you will end up with people who love you in ways I cannot. I promise.

And now for something completely different…check out more humor in my Cozy Sci-Fi Fantasy Series here on Substack: