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Pluto, Animal Lover
Meet the charming Pluto Hellbender Gerome, an ASPCA dog-walker, copyeditor of a pancreatic medical journal, and spin art artist. He is obsessed with cleanliness, his health, astrology, animals and whether or not they're being treated humanely, and with Wanda, a beautiful redhead and fellow dog-walker with a mysterious night job. Pluto's twisted sensibility, radical compulsions, despair at human behavior, and utopian dreams - realized with the help of his pet raven, Sunshine - drive the novel toward a climax that is as inevitable as it is surprising. At once dark comedy and psychological suspense, Pluto, Animal Lover introduces a character you will never forget and a writer with one of the most daring and distinctive voices in contemporary literature.
- GenresFictionContemporary
176 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1994
2 people are currently reading
267 people want to read
About the author
Laren Stover
8 books113 followersA classically trained artist with literary DNA, Laren Stover writes fiction and nonfiction. She is a melancholy connoisseur, loves to visit faerie wishing wells, is editor-at-large of Faerie Magazine and writes for several publications including The New York Observer and The New York Times.
Laren's first style book The Bombshell Manual of Style (Hyperion), illustrated by Ruben Toledo, was pivotal in exploding Bombshell consciousness into a popular genre of its own when it was published in 2001. Laren has deconstructed the incandescence of Bohemians in Bohemian Manifesto, A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, 2004 and a new edition with Echo Point Books 2019) a book that captured the attention of a wide variety of readers from Joel Grey to Tom Robbins to Richard E. Grant. Her novel, Pluto, Animal Lover (HarperCollins), was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and she was named finalist by Anne Tyler for The Loft Award. It was recently optioned by actor Robin Wright.
Laren has done readings/interviews on NPR with Leonard Lopate, The Early Show with Bryant Gumbal and Lisa Birnbach, CNN with Rachel Wells, The Caroline Rhea Show, WOR-TV, Oxygen and more, and her work widely reviewed. Laren has received fellowships to Yaddo and Hawthornden Castle funded by Drue Heintz. Her awards include the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for fiction and the Dana Award. She has written for The New York Observer, The New York Times, Bergdorf Goodman Magazine, Bomb, German Vogue and her fiction and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines including mrbellersneighborhood.com and Guernica Magazine and her dramatic works performed at venues including Naked Angels Theatre, EST, The Chateau Marmont and the Algonquin. Laren's libretto for Lowell Liebermann, Appalachian Liebesleider, premiered at Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation.
Nick Tosches writes: “Reading Laren Stover is an engagement of the senses…a seduction of the senses—transporting you to the magical and softly illuminating place whence she writes.”
Follow her on INSTAGRAM: Faerie_Style
and
bohemian_manifesto_book
Laren's first style book The Bombshell Manual of Style (Hyperion), illustrated by Ruben Toledo, was pivotal in exploding Bombshell consciousness into a popular genre of its own when it was published in 2001. Laren has deconstructed the incandescence of Bohemians in Bohemian Manifesto, A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, 2004 and a new edition with Echo Point Books 2019) a book that captured the attention of a wide variety of readers from Joel Grey to Tom Robbins to Richard E. Grant. Her novel, Pluto, Animal Lover (HarperCollins), was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and she was named finalist by Anne Tyler for The Loft Award. It was recently optioned by actor Robin Wright.
Laren has done readings/interviews on NPR with Leonard Lopate, The Early Show with Bryant Gumbal and Lisa Birnbach, CNN with Rachel Wells, The Caroline Rhea Show, WOR-TV, Oxygen and more, and her work widely reviewed. Laren has received fellowships to Yaddo and Hawthornden Castle funded by Drue Heintz. Her awards include the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for fiction and the Dana Award. She has written for The New York Observer, The New York Times, Bergdorf Goodman Magazine, Bomb, German Vogue and her fiction and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines including mrbellersneighborhood.com and Guernica Magazine and her dramatic works performed at venues including Naked Angels Theatre, EST, The Chateau Marmont and the Algonquin. Laren's libretto for Lowell Liebermann, Appalachian Liebesleider, premiered at Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation.
Nick Tosches writes: “Reading Laren Stover is an engagement of the senses…a seduction of the senses—transporting you to the magical and softly illuminating place whence she writes.”
Follow her on INSTAGRAM: Faerie_Style
and
bohemian_manifesto_book
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
October 11, 2019
Another "really? I bought six? Why, thirtysomething me, did you do that?"
These little mysteries keep life interesting. I wish I'd been writing more reviews back then, although it's possible I did review it and can't find the old one anywhere.
These little mysteries keep life interesting. I wish I'd been writing more reviews back then, although it's possible I did review it and can't find the old one anywhere.
October 27, 2019
Some viewers of No Country for Old Men will remember it as a film they didn't want to yield to, but couldn't resist; a similar current of emotions kept me clawing through the pages of Pluto, Animal Lover. More wry satire than sober psychological portrait, the more you want to rise above it, the more deeply it pulls you under. You find yourself feeling guilty for laughing at Pluto's perversities. I have long admired this debut by a hilariouly wicked talent pecking her way into the literary preening order, and have long wondered what kind of mind could have hatched it. The book's greatest perversity is that Pluto's evil plots are so well intended, fueled as they are by a species of idealism as strategic as it is naïve, a breed of cold-blooded compassion. But there's more at work here than that: what really creeps one out are the moments of self-recogniton one feels with Pluto and with the bemused psyche of his creator. This leads to flashes of self-recognition like one in the Yeats poem "The Grey Rock," just after the spirit Aoife (cool name), trembling with passion in the banquet hall of the gods, overflows with grief and rage that her lover, a mere mortal, has forsaken her divine protection and has thus been slain upon the battlefield.
She cast herself upon the ground
And rent her clothes and made her moan:
'Why are they faithless when their might
Is from the holy shades that rove
The grey rock and the windy light?
Why should the faithfullest heart most love
The bitter sweetness of false faces?
Why must the lasting love what passes,
Why are the gods by men betrayed?'
But thereon every god stood up
With a slow smile and without sound,
And stretching forth his arm and cup
To where she moaned upon the ground,
Suddenly drenched her to the skin;
And she with Goban's wine adrip,
No more remembering what had been.
Stared at the gods with laughing lip.
If Pluto has a moral, it's in the direction of lectio divina, of a reading that opens to a sense of divine detachment. As Yeats wrote of Yeats' poem, "The moral's yours because it's mine." Aoife's sense of bemused detachment was, for the poet, one of our deepest responsibilities.
She cast herself upon the ground
And rent her clothes and made her moan:
'Why are they faithless when their might
Is from the holy shades that rove
The grey rock and the windy light?
Why should the faithfullest heart most love
The bitter sweetness of false faces?
Why must the lasting love what passes,
Why are the gods by men betrayed?'
But thereon every god stood up
With a slow smile and without sound,
And stretching forth his arm and cup
To where she moaned upon the ground,
Suddenly drenched her to the skin;
And she with Goban's wine adrip,
No more remembering what had been.
Stared at the gods with laughing lip.
If Pluto has a moral, it's in the direction of lectio divina, of a reading that opens to a sense of divine detachment. As Yeats wrote of Yeats' poem, "The moral's yours because it's mine." Aoife's sense of bemused detachment was, for the poet, one of our deepest responsibilities.
January 8, 2008
My all-time favorite disturbing book is Pluto, Animal Lover, by Laren Stover:
"From Library Journal...
When the narrator of this quirky first novel introduces himself as Pluto Hellbender Gerome, animal lover, Stover's readers will immediately be transported to the private hell of a young man more aptly labeled an extreme misanthropist. From the outset, Pluto sets about perversely proving his love for animals in a fashion horribly reminiscent of any nightmarish narrator created by Poe. All the while, this immaculately dressed control freak obsesses about Wanda, the woman of his dreams, who possesses her own peculiar and secretive past and present. Stover's brilliantly dark humor may win readers over, but her depiction of the at times downright gruesome acts of this self-proclaimed animal lover is guaranteed to earn her low marks with PETA."
It was creepy, but Pluto is so bizarre, so twisted, yet his intentions and his beliefs are somehow still something that you can almost understand, at least from his perspective. He believes he is saving animals from exploitation and abuse. It is darkly comic, and his obsessions are so well-plotted that you almost become him.
"From Library Journal...
When the narrator of this quirky first novel introduces himself as Pluto Hellbender Gerome, animal lover, Stover's readers will immediately be transported to the private hell of a young man more aptly labeled an extreme misanthropist. From the outset, Pluto sets about perversely proving his love for animals in a fashion horribly reminiscent of any nightmarish narrator created by Poe. All the while, this immaculately dressed control freak obsesses about Wanda, the woman of his dreams, who possesses her own peculiar and secretive past and present. Stover's brilliantly dark humor may win readers over, but her depiction of the at times downright gruesome acts of this self-proclaimed animal lover is guaranteed to earn her low marks with PETA."
It was creepy, but Pluto is so bizarre, so twisted, yet his intentions and his beliefs are somehow still something that you can almost understand, at least from his perspective. He believes he is saving animals from exploitation and abuse. It is darkly comic, and his obsessions are so well-plotted that you almost become him.
April 3, 2020
A strange little book that deliver a wallop as it develops. I found this book hilarious, but for those of you without a dark sense of humour, be careful, be very very careful.
Without giving too much away, “Animal Lover” is an ironic title.
March 2020 update: “Sometimes I feel like I’m the last compassionate person on earth.” A darker, more disturbing character study than I recall. On this reading, would not describe it as “hilarious”. It is however darkly brilliant— a glimpse how intellect and reason can work to twist and distort empathy. It is also a satirical view on how empathy for animals can replace or override empathy for fellow humans.
Without giving too much away, “Animal Lover” is an ironic title.
March 2020 update: “Sometimes I feel like I’m the last compassionate person on earth.” A darker, more disturbing character study than I recall. On this reading, would not describe it as “hilarious”. It is however darkly brilliant— a glimpse how intellect and reason can work to twist and distort empathy. It is also a satirical view on how empathy for animals can replace or override empathy for fellow humans.
April 28, 2015
This is not a book about a detective “getting into the mind” of a sociopath or about authorities hiring a psychologist to profile psychotic behavior, in order to catch a criminal. It is a monologue of an attractive, charming, part-time dog walker. Narrated not by his voice but his mind.
Shamefully I feel that saying that I enjoyed this book is like revealing that I relish watching little boys pluck the wings off flies.
Shamefully I feel that saying that I enjoyed this book is like revealing that I relish watching little boys pluck the wings off flies.
May 5, 2011
This small novel packs a lot of punch... the visceral kind. It was amazing how the author got inside the mind of a psychopath. At times it was hard to turn the pages because I was afraid of what the next would have in store for me. Not for the squeamish, but not toooo bad considering the subject matter. Was like watching a derailed train reach it's inevitable conclusion. I still had hope... but alas... not a warm and fuzzy book with a warm and fuzzy ending.
August 28, 2009
The Pick
By Carlos Dews
Pluto, Animal Lover
(published on SMYLES & FISH)
Before she published the arguably less literary Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, 2004) and The Bombshell Manual of Style (Hyperion, 2001), Laren Stover published her first, and so far only, novel, Pluto, Animal Lover (HarperCollins, 1994). The novel came and went with little critical notice, with the apex of its publication a mixed review by Joe Queenan in the New York Times. Despite its lack of acclaim or sales success, the novel has haunted me ever since I first read it, holding my attention more than any other book I have read during the last thirteen years.
I remember everything about the novel, including where I sat while first reading it (in a Subway sandwich shop in Pensacola, Florida), the feel of the small hardcover book in my hands (4.5 inches by 6 inches, a size that was in vogue for a short while during the mid-1990s), the glamorous black and white author photograph that covered the back of the dust jacket. The front cover featured a faded photograph of a black chicken, a man's hand with dirty fingernails clutching its neck. But far more significant than these memories is the mood of the novel's dark story and the chilling narrator's voice and actions.
I have read the book at least once a year since it was published, and although a few things in it are beginning to seem dated, it continues to impress every time. Although I feel a pang of apprehension for admitting this about this book, given the numerous novels from writers with greater names and reputations that I have read since first reading Pluto, Animal Lover, it is, by far, the book I have most often recommended to both my students of literature and creative writing.
The novel’s story is as simple as its narrator’s personality is twisted. The novel concerns Pluto Hellbender Gerome, a volunteer ASPCA dog walker and the editor of a medical journal dedicated to the pancreas. He follows a twisted logic and philosophy from simple eccentricity to what I will call pathological, homicidal sympathy. The novel is written as an extended internal monologue in Pluto's voice; everything is tempered and filtered through his self-serving psyche. And everything we learn about the reactions to his increasingly strange behavior is filtered by his unique take on their responses.
Although they are not meant to excuse it (but perhaps to simply justify it) we do learn, through Pluto's own reflections, the apparent causes for his behavior. Born in New Orleans, the son of a woman who might have been a prostitute, Pluto's naïve, at times comic, descriptions of her life seem to inform his actions. And, perhaps more important, Pluto was clearly abused by an evil, sadistic stepfather.
Against the backdrop of early 1990s Manhattan, Pluto's admirable sympathy for the city's pets tips to a pathological desire to surreptitiously kill them to prevent what he perceives as their continued abuse. By the end of the novel it is apparent that Pluto is on the verge of applying the same logic to his fellow citizens of New York, whose lives he sees, in a spin of sympathy, to be not worth living. In particular, Pluto wants to end the miserable life of his co-volunteer, would-be composer, and girlfriend Wanda, whose life he learns is also, in his thinking, not worth living.
Nominated for a 1994 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Pluto, Animal Lover received little critical notice when it was published in 1994. Delilah Jones, reviewing the novel in the St. Petersburg Times, described Stover as "a really deranged, deliciously talented writer," from whom she wished to see more work, but called the book "silly." Another reviewer, Ron Rollins, in the Dayton Daily News, wrote: "Pluto is a sick little man, and Pluto, Animal Lover is a strange little book. But it's also compellingly readable."
Joe Queenan's review of the book in the New York Times proposes that Stover's efforts ultimately fail when she takes her macabre book into what Queenan calls her "Bret Easton Ellis mode" in describing Pluto's crucifixion of a live cat. Queenan unfortunately misses the point, and art, of the novel by passing judgment on the character's actions (he concludes his review with "All in all, Pluto is one sick pup") rather than on the technical and aesthetic successes of the novel.
The most important (and overlooked) aspect of the novel is its artful use of voice in monologue. While providing the gruesome details of the narrator's actions, the novel also builds empathy for what could easily be a contemptible, insufferable, non-readable character. Not since the immediacy and delusional honesty of Holden Caulfield's voice has an American writer, employing first person narration, captured with authenticity and unblinking courage the internal life (as well as pathology and eccentricity) of a character. The novel is a marvel for capturing the internal monologue of a psychopath as he degenerates from mere amusing quirkiness to homicidal empathy.
I wish there were a prize awarded to novels that, after perhaps ten years or so, are deemed worthy of renewed attention and consideration. I would nominate Pluto, Animal Lover for just such a prize so that readers and reviewers would give it a second chance.
[For New York readers, at last perusal multiple copies of Pluto, Animal Lover were on the shelves at The Strand and other second hand bookstores in Manhattan. For readers outside of New York, the book can be had on Amazon.com for as little as one cent (plus postage) and at ABEbooks.com for one dollar.:]
Carlos Dews was born into a world-class cockfighting family in East Texas but fled to the halls of academe where he received a Ph.D. in American literature. After ten years as a university professor he escaped the noose of tenure to write fiction and book reviews. He knows more about Carson McCullers's life and work than he knows about himself.
By Carlos Dews
Pluto, Animal Lover
(published on SMYLES & FISH)
Before she published the arguably less literary Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, 2004) and The Bombshell Manual of Style (Hyperion, 2001), Laren Stover published her first, and so far only, novel, Pluto, Animal Lover (HarperCollins, 1994). The novel came and went with little critical notice, with the apex of its publication a mixed review by Joe Queenan in the New York Times. Despite its lack of acclaim or sales success, the novel has haunted me ever since I first read it, holding my attention more than any other book I have read during the last thirteen years.
I remember everything about the novel, including where I sat while first reading it (in a Subway sandwich shop in Pensacola, Florida), the feel of the small hardcover book in my hands (4.5 inches by 6 inches, a size that was in vogue for a short while during the mid-1990s), the glamorous black and white author photograph that covered the back of the dust jacket. The front cover featured a faded photograph of a black chicken, a man's hand with dirty fingernails clutching its neck. But far more significant than these memories is the mood of the novel's dark story and the chilling narrator's voice and actions.
I have read the book at least once a year since it was published, and although a few things in it are beginning to seem dated, it continues to impress every time. Although I feel a pang of apprehension for admitting this about this book, given the numerous novels from writers with greater names and reputations that I have read since first reading Pluto, Animal Lover, it is, by far, the book I have most often recommended to both my students of literature and creative writing.
The novel’s story is as simple as its narrator’s personality is twisted. The novel concerns Pluto Hellbender Gerome, a volunteer ASPCA dog walker and the editor of a medical journal dedicated to the pancreas. He follows a twisted logic and philosophy from simple eccentricity to what I will call pathological, homicidal sympathy. The novel is written as an extended internal monologue in Pluto's voice; everything is tempered and filtered through his self-serving psyche. And everything we learn about the reactions to his increasingly strange behavior is filtered by his unique take on their responses.
Although they are not meant to excuse it (but perhaps to simply justify it) we do learn, through Pluto's own reflections, the apparent causes for his behavior. Born in New Orleans, the son of a woman who might have been a prostitute, Pluto's naïve, at times comic, descriptions of her life seem to inform his actions. And, perhaps more important, Pluto was clearly abused by an evil, sadistic stepfather.
Against the backdrop of early 1990s Manhattan, Pluto's admirable sympathy for the city's pets tips to a pathological desire to surreptitiously kill them to prevent what he perceives as their continued abuse. By the end of the novel it is apparent that Pluto is on the verge of applying the same logic to his fellow citizens of New York, whose lives he sees, in a spin of sympathy, to be not worth living. In particular, Pluto wants to end the miserable life of his co-volunteer, would-be composer, and girlfriend Wanda, whose life he learns is also, in his thinking, not worth living.
Nominated for a 1994 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Pluto, Animal Lover received little critical notice when it was published in 1994. Delilah Jones, reviewing the novel in the St. Petersburg Times, described Stover as "a really deranged, deliciously talented writer," from whom she wished to see more work, but called the book "silly." Another reviewer, Ron Rollins, in the Dayton Daily News, wrote: "Pluto is a sick little man, and Pluto, Animal Lover is a strange little book. But it's also compellingly readable."
Joe Queenan's review of the book in the New York Times proposes that Stover's efforts ultimately fail when she takes her macabre book into what Queenan calls her "Bret Easton Ellis mode" in describing Pluto's crucifixion of a live cat. Queenan unfortunately misses the point, and art, of the novel by passing judgment on the character's actions (he concludes his review with "All in all, Pluto is one sick pup") rather than on the technical and aesthetic successes of the novel.
The most important (and overlooked) aspect of the novel is its artful use of voice in monologue. While providing the gruesome details of the narrator's actions, the novel also builds empathy for what could easily be a contemptible, insufferable, non-readable character. Not since the immediacy and delusional honesty of Holden Caulfield's voice has an American writer, employing first person narration, captured with authenticity and unblinking courage the internal life (as well as pathology and eccentricity) of a character. The novel is a marvel for capturing the internal monologue of a psychopath as he degenerates from mere amusing quirkiness to homicidal empathy.
I wish there were a prize awarded to novels that, after perhaps ten years or so, are deemed worthy of renewed attention and consideration. I would nominate Pluto, Animal Lover for just such a prize so that readers and reviewers would give it a second chance.
[For New York readers, at last perusal multiple copies of Pluto, Animal Lover were on the shelves at The Strand and other second hand bookstores in Manhattan. For readers outside of New York, the book can be had on Amazon.com for as little as one cent (plus postage) and at ABEbooks.com for one dollar.:]
Carlos Dews was born into a world-class cockfighting family in East Texas but fled to the halls of academe where he received a Ph.D. in American literature. After ten years as a university professor he escaped the noose of tenure to write fiction and book reviews. He knows more about Carson McCullers's life and work than he knows about himself.
Read
August 7, 2021man this new wes anderson adaptation of american psycho is something else! rly tho, while they may be similarly well-versed in fabric care, pluto's got tastes & hobbies that would give patrick bateman hives: loves making spin art; proudly owns a lava lamp. the book also ends, unlike b.e.e.'s, just before things go fully grand guignol. v funny in spots (e.g. considering the name "rasputina" for a pet weasel) for a story where the hero trains his raven as an angel of death. hand wash in warm water, please, i wouldn't like to see what this would do inside of a washing machine
December 24, 2008
I've read this book over and over. I love how no line is wasted. Almost every sentence in the book serves to show how demented Pluto truly is. Yes, it's violent towards animals, so the squeamish will be put up (I winced at two specific scenes) but it's not totally disgusting. A quick little read.
edit: Oops, I guess she has written other things! My mistake.
edit: Oops, I guess she has written other things! My mistake.
July 28, 2019
It's like JT LeRoy meets Weetzie Bat. Wonderfully screwed up.
January 10, 2024
I bought this book at the Green Valley Book Fair (VA) while in graduate school at JMU back in the aughts. It really reshaped the way I felt about being one of those "animal lovers" and carried out that premise to the nth degree. I had already been stewing on what I learned in the upper-level philosophy seminar on animal welfare at my undergraduate institution. It was a tiny and odd book but was one of those impactful reads that has stayed with me even to this day, which is why I decided to find it on Goodreads.
June 19, 2023
A weird little book about a man that really could've used some therapy. (despite it's title I'm glad I didn't read this when I was nine. 😅) However, it is an interesting exploration of this character's inner life and how his perceptions lead to a downward slope of devastating results.
September 21, 2020
Screams “American Psycho” but with animals added in.
December 16, 2022
hands down the most disturbing story I’ve ever read. couldn’t stop though
April 8, 2024
pretty cool, pretty good, and then occasionally brilliant. a B-movie type novella.
January 13, 2008
Read this a while ago. A disturbing love story. Pretty cool.
October 1, 2008
The cover caught my attention (damn artists), and it's about the evolution of a psychopath.
Read
June 22, 2010signed by author
May 28, 2011
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha
June 23, 2011
Bleak and bleakly funny.
August 4, 2011
Weird but very good. And a quick read!
October 17, 2014
Read it in one sweep. Deeply convincing, darkly poetic, a haunting glimpse of obsessive love.
June 18, 2015
Momma Mia, not what I thought it was going to be when I picked it up. It has its merits, I do see this, but it's not for me.
April 19, 2016
A creepy story.
Want to read
September 1, 2017Good aahgaq gjoa oahjgoajgagjpag '[pk[aggagag
never-finished
October 4, 2017Read a good chunk of the beginning, then skipped to the end to see if it went where I thought it was going. Yep. I can tolerate human-on-human violence, but not human-on-animal stuff.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews