Doctor Rat
A bloodcurdling novel in the spirit of Animal Farm and 1984, Doctor Rat is a trip through a laboratory worthy of a mad scientist—except this scientist is a wisecracking rodent.
WHAT CRITICS ARE SAYING
“Dazzlingly original, witty and insanely satiric. It is also occasionally quite beautiful. Kotzwinkle’s tale is a dizzying montage... from scenes of gross black humor in the experimental lab to idyllic glimpses of the animal kingdom. Designed to shock us into ecological awareness, Kotzwinkle’s lab experiments are hair-raising.”
“Weird and wonderful... Kotzwinkle attempts a spectacular feat of sympathetic imagination: to get inside the skin of a rat. It is a fantastic and ferocious Animal Factory Farm, a splendidly nutty Magnificat with echoes of William Blake.”
“It’s as good as Gulliver’s Travels and Kotzwinkle is very close to Jonathan Swift... a masterwork.”
“A fascinating book, full of deeply felt emotion, important ideas, and heartbreaking insights.”
“Mr. Kotzwinkle is a first-rate fabulist, sly and sad.”
“Kotzwinkle is a truly imaginative impresario of the might-almost-be-true and here he spins a new fable on the cyclometered wheels in the laboratory of Doctor Rat. How can you not enjoy Doctor Rat? It teases your conscience with educated wit and versatile improvisation, not to mention the casual flick of a tail about to be cut off.”
“A comic triumph... Doctor Rat is thoroughly anthropomorphic, very funny, and not lacking in the bite of truth essential to good satire. ”
“Kotzwinkle… has an eloquent sense of timing and brevity, and his quisling rodent proves to be an ingenious device, one that cleverly wisecracks us into a gut-churning realization of just how self-oriented and inhumane our species really is.”
“A faint but authentic Blakeian echo in Mr. Kotzwinkle’s rage gives the book the voltage necessary to bypass insulating ideas and strike right into the emotions.”
“A clout from the pen of a modern Zen master of the literary world.”