From the Vault: Book Review of Doctor Rat
Back in the early 1990s, a buddy of mine started, with one of his confreres, a tiny lil' zine called Opinion Dominated, or O.D. for short. It never had a run of more than a 150 copies, tops -- I believe the usual run was closer to a hundred -- and if it got distributed very far afield of our immediate exurban area, it was most likely thanks to the auspices of that zine clearing-house, Factsheet Five.
Anyhoo, my buddy recruited me to write the occasional review for his zine with the second issue, as he was having trouble getting enough content that early in his brainchild's career. Over the course of time, possibly due to the desire to help out a friend, possibly due to boredom, possibly due to the fact that I was nowhere near Hyde Park of a Sunday afternoon, I churned out quite a few reviews for his inventory file, in case he ever got caught short of content from his other contributors. (Longtime readers of Marvel Comics will be familiar with this phenomenon, known as "The Dreaded Deadline Doom:" you'd be happily reading one of Marvel's all-new comics -- The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man -- following some "senses-shattering" storyline or other, when you'd breathlessly pick up up the latest issue, only to find -- shudder -- a reprint. Sometimes it would be just the reprint in toto; and sometimes there would be one or two pages of new content wherein the hero[es] would be seen ruminating, "Ah, yes, how well I remember when first we fought...", and then, WHOOMPF, there was the reprint, big as life and twice as ugly. If the writer was really clever, he'd make the reprint the whole point of the story, as did Steve Gerber in Giant-Size Defenders #1 or, less imaginatively, Len Wein in Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #154, wherein the FF are winging home in their Fantasticar, a one-shot baddie from the Human Torch's solo strip [which, towards the end, he shared with the Thing] in Strange Tales, "The Man in the Mystery Mask," zaps their car, causing it to go into a power dive straight into Manhattan's concrete canyons, and the Thing and the Torch begin swapping memories of their adventure with "The Man in the Mystery Mask," and WHOOMPF, there's [most of] the Strange Tales reprint. I know the FF had been around the block a time or three at this point, but for them to pull up a toadstool, put their feet up, and start spielin' a real Mother McCrea in the midst of a zero-point landing in the middle of New York City is stretching the reader's credulity just a bit too far. But I digress.) Before he or I knew it, I had supplied him with enough inventory so that he could've just about run an "all Dingman!" issue, if he was desperate enough -- or crazed enough -- to do so.
All this is by way of introducing one of those "nerve-numbing nuggets" (geez, this Stan Leesian alliteration is habit-forming....) from long ago and, err, not so far away. It can't be properly called a reprint since it never saw light of day, even in Zineland. This one's a book review of an offering by that other odd Maine resident, William Kotzwinkle, and it (the book, if not the review) will really make you fight to hang onto your lunch. I call it...
"Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em!"
or
"You have the right to remain silent..."
Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle
copyright 1976
Bard Books, pub. by Avon Books, NY
ISBN: 0-380-63990-4
215 pps.
The issue of animal rights is seldom given the presentation it deserves. In an era when Big Questions are reduced to smart-assed bumper stickers ("Save a deer---shoot an activist"), media events or acts of terrorism, it's all-too-easy to lose sight of just what the question is.
Animal rights is certainly no different from any other issue facing mankind today. The question, How are human beings to treat their fellow animals? (and certainly this phrasing too is hotly contested), may not make headlines or occupy legislatures' time the way other issues do; nonetheless, its divisive effect and lack of an easy, clear-cut solution are indicative of how far-reaching a question it is: its answer, for good or ill, contains much of the definition of the word "human."
Neither side of the debate can realistically claim to be holding a moral or ethical higher ground; like other emotionally-charged issues, animal rights and the deeds and misdeeds of its polarized camps could easily provide fodder for an hour-length "Bloopers, Bleepers and Blunders" special. There's the atrocity of "game ranches," where wild animals are kept exclusively for the purpose of being there for some passive-aggressive zhlub with more money than decency to kill; there's the incredibly tasteless (and, thankfully, eighty-sixed) anti-fur advertising campaign of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals depicting River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain over a caption that reads, "We wouldn't be caught dead in fur!" Multiply these two incidents to the nth power, and you have a catalog of arrogance, destruction, pettifogging and rank stupidity that varies little from any other account of the human race's grappling with itself over matters great and small. No surprise, then, that so many mainstream media accounts of the animal rights debate shed heat, but little light, on the subject.
William Kotzwinkle's Doctor Rat, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1977, is a welcome anodyne. Presented in the form of a fable à la Orwell's Animal Farm, Doctor Rat centers around a laboratory rat--an apologist for the human race--who earned his degree in psychology by virtue of having been driven insane by the experiments performed upon him. Doctor Rat berates and vilifies his fellow lab animals who fail to share his joy at participating in the scientific inquiries of man; his apologia comes across as kind of a cosmic used car huckster's pitch. In trying to sell his fellow lab animals "national security" and "scientific truth," he colors these high concepts with an irredeemable taint of prurience: the "truth" he is offering has had its transmission packed with oatmeal and its odometer turned back by several thousand miles.
Doctor Rat publishes scientific articles on the various sadistic experiments occurring around him; Kotzwinkle splices in fragments of actual reports to chilling--and vaguely Burroughsian--effect. (Doctor Rat himself is faintly reminiscent of Doc Benway.) A caveat to the reader: Doctor Rat is NOT the squeamish. To be quite blunt, this is the only book I almost quit reading, not because it was boring, not because it was too esoteric and densely written, not because it was badly or ineptly written---but because it disgusted me. I was nearly physically ill at a few points, and though I'd writhe in my chair, scream in horror and revulsion and throw the book down, I would always end up picking it up again. (This makes the fact that portions of Doctor Rat first saw publication in Redbook, of all places, all the more incredible.) An eyewitness account from "the good doctor" offers some indication of what this book holds in store for the reader:
"As you can see, the basic model in this experiment is a rabbit. He's wearing a rather ingenious bathing cap. It's actually a double bonnet,
watertight, fitted snugly to the rabbit's head.
"The graduate assistant is now pouring--there it goes--the boiling water into the rabbit's bonnet. Look at that big-footed fucker kick! (Lepus americanus) His eyes are bulging out and his breathing grows rapid as the bonnet is filled to capacity with the boiling water. The water is scalding his whole noggin. Isn't this exciting?"
As with the Holocaust, the litany of horrors presented in Doctor Rat becomes a senseless, numbing exercise in mnemonics if the events are merely summarized. To list the experiments given in this book reduces them to blurbs on a Faces of Death video: a dog is gassed to death by carbon monoxide to determine how long it takes to die. Another dog is placed on a treadmill with several heat lamps aimed at it and is made to walk until it has a heart attack. A tray-full of kittens, their paws taped to the tray, is cooked inside a microwave until their tails explode, their extremities turn blue and they are bleeding vaginally. A rat has segments of its intestines removed and grafted onto its eyeballs. There's a lot of half-sense and nonsense in the experiments described in Doctor Rat; what possible purpose can grafting a hank of intestine to an animal's eyeballs possibly serve? If nothing else, reading Doctor Rat gives a keener understanding as to why the Allies winked at so many of the "medical studies" conducted by Nazi and Japanese doctors.
The point of view shifts several times to various other animals as they cope with being meat-byproducts for man (there's an especially gripping chapter narrated by a pig, relating his brief, unhappy life in a processing plant) or as they slip the leash man has set upon them (and himself); Doctor Rat's antitheses are the eagles, who call all the world's animals to a convocation where they will turn their collective strength towards a divine gestalt, whose manifestation is called The One Animal, and who is their only hope for survival. The lab animals--all save Doctor Rat--are not immune to this summons; the first group to hear the call establish what Doctor Rat dubs a Rebel Broadcasting Network: a series of telempathic images that show in no-uncertain terms that the smokey link stuck on a fork with a dab of maple syrup on it was once a living, breathing, frightened pig. Doctor Rat's aghast dismay at the rebels' "network" and his frantic counter-propaganda efforts, and the growing bands of free and masterless animals outside the lab meld together in a dark allegretto that reaches its crescendo in a repressive east African country (read: Uganda).
Kotzwinkle is a wide-ranging author, perhaps best known to mainstream readers for his novelization of the movie E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial; he's had one of his books, Jack of Hearts, turned into a 1990 movie called The Book of Love (an innocuous coming-of-age film set in the late '50s), and he has written several children's books, such as The Ship That Came Down the Gutter and The Ants Who Took Away Time. His books sometimes don't succeed as a whole, but they remain "good reads" (such as The Exile, about a man who channels, à la Billy Pilgrim, into a past life as a black marketeer in Nazi Germany).
Doctor Rat, however, is a revelation. It is not an easy book, it is not a happy book, it is not a fun book, but it is an essential book. More than anything else I've read (including Grant Morrison's distinguished run on DC Comics' Animal Man), Doctor Rat does what is necessary and sorely needed: with a stroke, it sears away all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit, the snarky remarks, the name-calling, the posing, the claptrap and skullduggery associated with the debate over animal rights and reveals what is really at stake. My fellow residents! It is ourselves.
--Ron Dingman,
17 September 1994
Anyhoo, my buddy recruited me to write the occasional review for his zine with the second issue, as he was having trouble getting enough content that early in his brainchild's career. Over the course of time, possibly due to the desire to help out a friend, possibly due to boredom, possibly due to the fact that I was nowhere near Hyde Park of a Sunday afternoon, I churned out quite a few reviews for his inventory file, in case he ever got caught short of content from his other contributors. (Longtime readers of Marvel Comics will be familiar with this phenomenon, known as "The Dreaded Deadline Doom:" you'd be happily reading one of Marvel's all-new comics -- The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man -- following some "senses-shattering" storyline or other, when you'd breathlessly pick up up the latest issue, only to find -- shudder -- a reprint. Sometimes it would be just the reprint in toto; and sometimes there would be one or two pages of new content wherein the hero[es] would be seen ruminating, "Ah, yes, how well I remember when first we fought...", and then, WHOOMPF, there was the reprint, big as life and twice as ugly. If the writer was really clever, he'd make the reprint the whole point of the story, as did Steve Gerber in Giant-Size Defenders #1 or, less imaginatively, Len Wein in Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #154, wherein the FF are winging home in their Fantasticar, a one-shot baddie from the Human Torch's solo strip [which, towards the end, he shared with the Thing] in Strange Tales, "The Man in the Mystery Mask," zaps their car, causing it to go into a power dive straight into Manhattan's concrete canyons, and the Thing and the Torch begin swapping memories of their adventure with "The Man in the Mystery Mask," and WHOOMPF, there's [most of] the Strange Tales reprint. I know the FF had been around the block a time or three at this point, but for them to pull up a toadstool, put their feet up, and start spielin' a real Mother McCrea in the midst of a zero-point landing in the middle of New York City is stretching the reader's credulity just a bit too far. But I digress.) Before he or I knew it, I had supplied him with enough inventory so that he could've just about run an "all Dingman!" issue, if he was desperate enough -- or crazed enough -- to do so.
All this is by way of introducing one of those "nerve-numbing nuggets" (geez, this Stan Leesian alliteration is habit-forming....) from long ago and, err, not so far away. It can't be properly called a reprint since it never saw light of day, even in Zineland. This one's a book review of an offering by that other odd Maine resident, William Kotzwinkle, and it (the book, if not the review) will really make you fight to hang onto your lunch. I call it...
"Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em!"
or
"You have the right to remain silent..."
Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle
copyright 1976
Bard Books, pub. by Avon Books, NY
ISBN: 0-380-63990-4
215 pps.
The issue of animal rights is seldom given the presentation it deserves. In an era when Big Questions are reduced to smart-assed bumper stickers ("Save a deer---shoot an activist"), media events or acts of terrorism, it's all-too-easy to lose sight of just what the question is.
Animal rights is certainly no different from any other issue facing mankind today. The question, How are human beings to treat their fellow animals? (and certainly this phrasing too is hotly contested), may not make headlines or occupy legislatures' time the way other issues do; nonetheless, its divisive effect and lack of an easy, clear-cut solution are indicative of how far-reaching a question it is: its answer, for good or ill, contains much of the definition of the word "human."
Neither side of the debate can realistically claim to be holding a moral or ethical higher ground; like other emotionally-charged issues, animal rights and the deeds and misdeeds of its polarized camps could easily provide fodder for an hour-length "Bloopers, Bleepers and Blunders" special. There's the atrocity of "game ranches," where wild animals are kept exclusively for the purpose of being there for some passive-aggressive zhlub with more money than decency to kill; there's the incredibly tasteless (and, thankfully, eighty-sixed) anti-fur advertising campaign of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals depicting River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain over a caption that reads, "We wouldn't be caught dead in fur!" Multiply these two incidents to the nth power, and you have a catalog of arrogance, destruction, pettifogging and rank stupidity that varies little from any other account of the human race's grappling with itself over matters great and small. No surprise, then, that so many mainstream media accounts of the animal rights debate shed heat, but little light, on the subject.
William Kotzwinkle's Doctor Rat, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1977, is a welcome anodyne. Presented in the form of a fable à la Orwell's Animal Farm, Doctor Rat centers around a laboratory rat--an apologist for the human race--who earned his degree in psychology by virtue of having been driven insane by the experiments performed upon him. Doctor Rat berates and vilifies his fellow lab animals who fail to share his joy at participating in the scientific inquiries of man; his apologia comes across as kind of a cosmic used car huckster's pitch. In trying to sell his fellow lab animals "national security" and "scientific truth," he colors these high concepts with an irredeemable taint of prurience: the "truth" he is offering has had its transmission packed with oatmeal and its odometer turned back by several thousand miles.
Doctor Rat publishes scientific articles on the various sadistic experiments occurring around him; Kotzwinkle splices in fragments of actual reports to chilling--and vaguely Burroughsian--effect. (Doctor Rat himself is faintly reminiscent of Doc Benway.) A caveat to the reader: Doctor Rat is NOT the squeamish. To be quite blunt, this is the only book I almost quit reading, not because it was boring, not because it was too esoteric and densely written, not because it was badly or ineptly written---but because it disgusted me. I was nearly physically ill at a few points, and though I'd writhe in my chair, scream in horror and revulsion and throw the book down, I would always end up picking it up again. (This makes the fact that portions of Doctor Rat first saw publication in Redbook, of all places, all the more incredible.) An eyewitness account from "the good doctor" offers some indication of what this book holds in store for the reader:
"As you can see, the basic model in this experiment is a rabbit. He's wearing a rather ingenious bathing cap. It's actually a double bonnet,
watertight, fitted snugly to the rabbit's head.
"The graduate assistant is now pouring--there it goes--the boiling water into the rabbit's bonnet. Look at that big-footed fucker kick! (Lepus americanus) His eyes are bulging out and his breathing grows rapid as the bonnet is filled to capacity with the boiling water. The water is scalding his whole noggin. Isn't this exciting?"
As with the Holocaust, the litany of horrors presented in Doctor Rat becomes a senseless, numbing exercise in mnemonics if the events are merely summarized. To list the experiments given in this book reduces them to blurbs on a Faces of Death video: a dog is gassed to death by carbon monoxide to determine how long it takes to die. Another dog is placed on a treadmill with several heat lamps aimed at it and is made to walk until it has a heart attack. A tray-full of kittens, their paws taped to the tray, is cooked inside a microwave until their tails explode, their extremities turn blue and they are bleeding vaginally. A rat has segments of its intestines removed and grafted onto its eyeballs. There's a lot of half-sense and nonsense in the experiments described in Doctor Rat; what possible purpose can grafting a hank of intestine to an animal's eyeballs possibly serve? If nothing else, reading Doctor Rat gives a keener understanding as to why the Allies winked at so many of the "medical studies" conducted by Nazi and Japanese doctors.
The point of view shifts several times to various other animals as they cope with being meat-byproducts for man (there's an especially gripping chapter narrated by a pig, relating his brief, unhappy life in a processing plant) or as they slip the leash man has set upon them (and himself); Doctor Rat's antitheses are the eagles, who call all the world's animals to a convocation where they will turn their collective strength towards a divine gestalt, whose manifestation is called The One Animal, and who is their only hope for survival. The lab animals--all save Doctor Rat--are not immune to this summons; the first group to hear the call establish what Doctor Rat dubs a Rebel Broadcasting Network: a series of telempathic images that show in no-uncertain terms that the smokey link stuck on a fork with a dab of maple syrup on it was once a living, breathing, frightened pig. Doctor Rat's aghast dismay at the rebels' "network" and his frantic counter-propaganda efforts, and the growing bands of free and masterless animals outside the lab meld together in a dark allegretto that reaches its crescendo in a repressive east African country (read: Uganda).
Kotzwinkle is a wide-ranging author, perhaps best known to mainstream readers for his novelization of the movie E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial; he's had one of his books, Jack of Hearts, turned into a 1990 movie called The Book of Love (an innocuous coming-of-age film set in the late '50s), and he has written several children's books, such as The Ship That Came Down the Gutter and The Ants Who Took Away Time. His books sometimes don't succeed as a whole, but they remain "good reads" (such as The Exile, about a man who channels, à la Billy Pilgrim, into a past life as a black marketeer in Nazi Germany).
Doctor Rat, however, is a revelation. It is not an easy book, it is not a happy book, it is not a fun book, but it is an essential book. More than anything else I've read (including Grant Morrison's distinguished run on DC Comics' Animal Man), Doctor Rat does what is necessary and sorely needed: with a stroke, it sears away all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit, the snarky remarks, the name-calling, the posing, the claptrap and skullduggery associated with the debate over animal rights and reveals what is really at stake. My fellow residents! It is ourselves.
--Ron Dingman,
17 September 1994