all about “stray cats”

It was the story I didn’t intend to write, but I’m glad I did.

Stray Cats, my latest novel, comes out this week. A follow-up to my 2014 post-apocalypse novel Lost Dogs, its premise is that cats really do have nine lives, but instead of living them one after the other, as is usually imagined, they live them all at once, on several worlds. Some of those worlds are like ours; some are very different.    

I say a “follow-up” to Lost Dogs rather than a sequel, because it’s not just a retelling of the end of the world with kitties in place of pooches. I had no interest in doing that. Prince, one of my idols, never made the same album twice, and while I’m no Prince, I don’t want to write the same book twice. Some authors are okay with doing that, but it would bore me, and that would show in my writing.

So, for many years, whenever someone who read Lost Dogs would ask, “Why don’t you do one about cats?” my usual reply was that it would be a one-page book: if the world came to a sudden, violent end, most cats would probably wake up from their naps; notice all the dead people; then yawn and go back to sleep.

But then I hit upon the “nine lives at the same time” idea, and decided to run with it.

Nine Lives. Nine Worlds.

Stray Cats is basically nine short stories, wrapped around a central narrative. I could say that its structure emulates the cerebral 2012 sci-fi film Cloud Atlas, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.

More honest and accurate is to say that it was much more influenced by the low-brow 1981 cult classic Heavy Metal. I’m not sorry to admit that, because as much as I admire the artistry of Cloud Atlas, I have to say that Heavy Metal is a lot more fun.

(Stray Cats, however, is much more family-friendly)

Nine stories set on nine worlds gave me the opportunity to flex some creative muscles. The name of each story references the world that it’s set in. As a follow-up to Lost Dogs, one of the stories needed to be from that world, so I took the little black cat from the scene in the barn (where Buddy, Sally, and Rex chase it) and made her, Pimmi, the main character of Stray Cats (more about her later).

I kept the barn scene in Stray Cats, albeit now told from Pimmi’s point of view, and built a story around her, telling what happened to her before and after that. All of this became the segment of Stray Cats that I named “A Lost World.”

I’ve been a big fan of space opera since first seeing Star Wars (“A New Hope”) in 1977: indeed, the very first novel I ever wrote (at the age of 11) was a Star Wars ripoff clone rendition. I’ve also been playing the tabletop miniature game Warhammer 40,000 since it arrived in the U.S. in 1987. I was able to combine those two interests in the story of a space marine fighting aliens alongside a boy and a cat (Pimmi again) in “A Sacred World.”

I grew up reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, of course, but also a lot of old-school “swords and sorcery” like Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. In homage to this genre, I created two heroes—the Scorpion and the Wolf—and had them meet Pimmi at the beginning of their adventuring careers in “An Ancient World.”

I also wanted to loop in the other two novels I had published. Dragontamer’s Daughters is a “Weird Western;” I tell people that it’s like Little House on the Prairie with dragons. “An Untamed World” takes place five years after the events in DTD, and it features Isabella and Alijandra, the main characters of the other book.

This Wasted Land is a dark fantasy/horror book with all-original monsters like you’ve never imagined. “A Wasted World” looks at what was going on parallel to the main action in TWL, focusing on the characters of Sam and the witch Freydis.

“A Fallen World” is an illustrated superhero comic book smack dab in the middle of Stray Cats. “A World of Friends” is a children’s picture story that I’ll republish later this year as a standalone work. I worked with two great artists to bring those tales to life, and I’m really happy with what they were able to do.

“Our World” is set in the here and now, but it’s anything but mundane: I can’t tell you more without major spoilers. “A Savage World” pretty bookends Stray Cats, telling about the bad guys that make Pimmi’s nine lives so very, very difficult.

The Kurindans

One day when I was a kid, I tuned in to one of my favorite TV shows, the original Star Trek, and was confronted by this fellow:

I thought then, and I still think, that lizardmen from space was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. So cool, that I came up with my own version. I first developed the Kurindans about 30 years ago for my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I expanded on the idea when I built a huge collection of gaming miniatures of them.

For Stray Cats, I took my earlier versions, dialed the weirdness up to 11, and broke off the knob:

Each of the creatures stood on two legs that bent backwards at the knees. Four arms ended in prehensile claws. Hides of smooth, purple scales, seemingly thick glass. A stumpy tail, spiked at the end. Two crocodilian heads on a single, squat neck. Sputtering white light dripped like tears from the five eye-nubs on the center of each head. More white light slopped from their jaws, filled with jagged black teeth.  

The Kurindans not only look freaky, they’re freaking crazy, on a suicidal deathquest. Native to a bizarre planet, the Kurindans fell into barbarism after their fledgling empire collapsed. As Stray Cats opens, they’ve united around a leader who launches them on warpath of destruction in the hope of gaining redemption from their new masters. And who are they?

“The Lights”

If you’ve read Lost Dogs, then you’ve encountered “the Lights,” the enigmatic beings who wipe out humankind in a single summer afternoon. Readers were left to guess if the Lights are aliens, angels, or something else. Also up for consideration was their motivation.

Stray Cats provides some answers, with the laconic space marine of “A Sacred World” dryly noting that the Lights are, “Extra-dimensional, plasma-based entities. Malevolent, of course.”

The Lights are the real villains of the book, using the Kurindans as catspaws (if you’ll forgive the pun) as part of a horrifying plan that threatens all the worlds of Stray Cats. It’s up to one small kitty to do what she can to stop them.

Our Feline Heroine

Appearing in all of the stories, Pimmi is a female black cat whose full name is Pimienta (the Spanish word for “pepper”). Though the stories take place at the same time, she’s different ages in them: in some, she’s a kitten; in others, full grown; and in others, very old. With those changes in age, her personality is not always exactly the same, but at her core, she is kind, inquisitive, intelligent, and resourceful, if not always brave.

During her adventures across the nine worlds, Pimmi meets several other cats, some friendly, some decidedly not. One of the cats appears in several of the stories, under different names, and he becomes something of a mentor to her. Pimmi encounters other animals, including a terrifying figure from Lost Dogs, as well as several people.

The character of Pimmi was inspired by our real-life Pimienta, who is, as of this writing (June 2022), eight years old. She is my younger daughter’s beloved cat, and we’ve had her since she was weaned. Many of the other cats in the book take their personalities from ones our family has had.

A New Direction

I love Lost Dogs, as do many people, but, man, it’s a heartbreaker. This Wasted Land is all kinds of twisted and wrong: when it came out, I was worried that people who know me in real life would read it and ask my wife if I need therapy. Dragontamer’s Daughters also gets pretty heavy.

Stray Cats, however, is deliberately lighter in tone, much more “fun” than my other novels. The swords-and-sorcery “Ancient World,” the space opera “Sacred World,” and the superhero comic “Fallen World” are pure adventure for its own sake. “A World of Friends” is a heartwarming coda. “A Savage World” is odd, but not dark.

And while the tone of the stories based on Lost Dogs, This Wasted Land, and Dragontamer’s Daughters reflect the original works, I tried to make them at least a little less grim. Fair warning, though: the end of “Our World” will make you cry. Keep a box of tissues handy.

All my books have themes. Lost Dogs is primarily about abandonment, but there are also many religious aspects to it (which I could write a whole blog post about). Dragontamer’s Daughters deals with money, specifically what one is willing to do for it, and what its effects are on people. This Wasted Land is all about s-e-x, and how it can be psychologically difficult, sometimes scary, for teenagers, and even adults.

Though it’s mostly meant to be entertainment, Stray Cats touches on fear, which a lot of us have dealt with over the last few years. The Lights are sinister, inscrutable forces of overwhelming power that no one can hope to contend with. The Kurindans are violent, xenophobic fanatics: as one character puts it, “to Kurindans, lives—even their own—have no value.” The fate of humanity is in peril, and Pimmi is small, insignificant, little different from the billions of cats like her. What can she, or anyone do, besides despair?

As it turns out, there are things that Pimmi—or anyone else—can do. As she takes on the Kurindans in the various stories, sometimes it’s enough just to escape them. Sometimes, she helps others as they face off against the monsters. Sometimes, she challenges them herself. And in sometimes…well, you’ll see.

It all starts with what Pimmi often tells herself, a mantra to push through the terror she feels when confronted by evil: “Be brave.” Even if it seems like there is no hope, even if it seems defeat is certain, at the very least, one can fight against fear. One can be brave.

I’ve never written anything like Stray Cats before—I’m not sure anyone has. It’s quirky and clever, playful and unpredictable, fun-loving yet sometimes dangerous. It’s just like cats, I suppose.

If you love cats, I hope you’ll like this book. You can find it on Amazon in softcover and for Kindle.

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Kenton Kilgore writes killer SF/F for young adults and adults who are still young. Follow Kenton on Facebook for frequent posts on sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative fiction. You can also catch him on Instagram.