How P-22 and Nick Cave inspired the queer mountain lion in novel ‘Open Throat’

“They say there is a cougar that roams these parts,” Nick Cave sings in “Hollywood,” the final track from his 2019 album “Ghosteen.” The cat, in Cave’s telling, has “a terrible engine of wrath for a heart … but at night lays trembling in my arms.”

When author Henry Hoke heard that song, it took him back to his days in Los Angeles, where he went to graduate school and later taught at the California Institute of the Arts. He was a regular visitor to Griffith Park, which was once home to a beloved Angeleno: P-22, the wild mountain lion who captivated not just residents of Southern California, but also animal lovers across the world (and the Los Angeles Public Library, which issued a limited-edition card featuring P-22 on it).

“I thought, ‘Well, at some point, I’m going to run into this cat. It’s going to have to happen,’” Hoke recalls in a telephone conversation from New York, where he now lives. “It didn’t, but just the idea that there was this big cat just out of sight in the park was really powerful for me.”

Hoke turned his fascination with the puma into a novel, “Open Throat,” published on June 6 by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His book follows heckit, a queer mountain lion that lives in L.A. and reflects upon the humans of the city. “I try to understand people but they make it hard,” the cat laments early in the book.

Hoke decided to write the novel after he had moved to New York and wanted to capture his experiences in California in fiction.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want to write about the art scene. I don’t want to write about driving around,’” he says. After hearing Cave’s song, he thought, “Oh, right, P-22. I wonder how that cat’s doing.”

“I thought about all the different experiences of people that this cat might have encountered, might have seen, and how would it ever make sense of it?” Hoke recalls. “I thought it would be a fun way to encapsulate what my time in L.A. was like, with everything overheard, everything encountered sort of fleetingly and mysteriously and unfulfilled.”

Hoke’s novel is co-dedicated to P-22, but the famous cougar and the fictional heckit aren’t the same cat. There’s an alternate version of P-22 in the novel, though: the puma who heckit calls “the kill sharer,” a fierce creature who shares food with the constantly hungry narrator.

“The kill sharer is this other cat who is like P-22 in an alternate world where P-22 didn’t make it across the 405,” Hoke says. “The kill sharer is a crush, a fleeting love interest who’s also assigned male. So there’s a gay element, but because of heckit’s journey towards a different kind of gender affirmation, I think it has this complicated quality, which speaks to me and my own experience.”

Later in the novel, heckit makes another friend: Jane, the 18-year-old daughter of a rock star named Slaughter who lives in the Hollywood Hills. Jane, a fledgling witch, names the cougar after the Greek goddess Hecate; heckit, in turn, refers to Jane as “little slaughter.”

“Little slaughter’s a little bit unhinged, to accept this big cat and not be afraid, because she sees it as a supernatural visitation that she almost expects,” Hoke says. “She sees something beyond either a threat or a predator, or even a male. She sees a goddess.”

Jane bears the name of another cat with whom Hoke was fascinated, and his novel is also dedicated to that feline — one that was much smaller than a mountain lion, but not necessarily any less fierce.

“Jane was an indoor-outdoor cat,” he explains. “I grew up in a little wooded neighborhood in the center of the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, not so close to major roads. It wasn’t a place where I was worried about the cat roaming around. The cat would really kill everything. This was a bloodthirsty little cat that would then sit with me on my pillow at night and lick my hand or my cheek, so sweet and companionable. But also I knew how fierce it was.”