Open Throat - Henry Hoke
I love it when I read a book right at the end of the year that turns out to be one of my favourites.
I don't remember why I picked up Open Throat. I assume that somebody recommended it to me, but I have no idea who that might have been. And when it came time to read it I couldn't remember what it was about, other than that I'd been told it was very gay.
It turns out that Open Throat is about a mountain lion living beneath the Hollywood sign, desperately trying to carve out a life for himself while avoiding the attentions of humans, who he doesn't understand at all. The story is told from the lion's point of view in a fragmented, prose-poem style that I fell in love with immediately.
If this is being marketed as a queer/gay book then I think that's quite misleading. There is a hint that the lion might be gay, and he's treated as a female cat by a human character for a large portion of the novella and seems to enjoy it, but those themes are so light and unimportant to the larger story that I don't think they're a meaningful way of talking about this.
Instead, I've been thinking of this as a very autistic book. I'm largely struggling to explain what I mean by that, other than to say that the way in which the lion experiences the world and experiences humans rings very true to my experience as an autistic person.
This is a very quick read and there's a part of me that wishes it had a little more meat on the bones, since in general the story is very simple. But it's an effective read, too, and I definitely think it's one of the best things I read in 2025.