THE GOLDEN CAT

Sequel to King’s cat fantasy The Wild Road (1998). At Tintagel, Cornwall, Pertelot the Queen of Cats has given birth to three golden kittens, Isis, Odin, and Leonora, any of which might be the prophesied Golden Cat. But an evil presence still haunts the wild roads, the ghost-highways that are composed of the souls of cats: evidently, the evil Alchemist, who wants to seize the Golden Cat (but what for?) isn’t entirely dead. Then Odin vanishes from the clifftops, abducted by a disembodied human hand. Next, Isis disappears, whisked away from a remote sea-cave. Bold, sassy Leonora teams up with Tag the Majicou, the guardian of the wild roads, to search for the missing pair. Sealink, the New England calico, goes off to New Orleans to find her lost kittens. Odin is deprived of an eye in a lab where cats are subjected to freakish experiments; when he’s freed from his cage by a protester’s bomb, he takes to the road, accompanied by Animal X, who’s had a metal device implanted into his head and remembers nothing. Pertelot journeys to ancient Egypt on the back of a giant magic stingray called, appropriately enough, Ray. Tag and Leonora visit the Reading (i.e., literate) Cat and his hideous, verminous assistant, Kater Murr, who live in the Alchemist’s now-deserted house. Tag eventually will figure it all out—unlike most readers. Crammed with doings and details, a maddeningly discursive narrative, unintelligible plotting, and magic that defies interpretation.