The “cat book” industrial complex is a lazy little racket. Slap a whiskered narrator on the cover, stir in a few human foibles, promise a warm hug by page fifty, and cash the reader’s need for softness. It’s comfort packaged as insight: the animal sees what we can’t, the animal heals what we broke, the animal delivers a tidy moral and everyone goes home clean. Alex Howard looks that assembly line in the eye and refuses to purr on command.
Howard’s Edinburgh isn’t a twee playground for a quirky feline tour guide. It’s a living system—tenements, institutions, hierarchies, years piling up like soot—and his cats don’t exist to reassure you that humans are basically fine underneath the stress. They exist to expose how much of city life is performance: the public face, the private rot, the rituals we call “culture” that are really just ways of managing guilt.
Start with Library Cat. On paper, it’s an easy sell: a thinking cat in the University of Edinburgh’s main library, observant, wry, philosophical. That could have been pure gimmick. Instead, Howard uses the premise as a scalpel. The cat’s gaze isn’t cute; it’s clinical. The library becomes what it actually is: an institution built on sorting, ranking, and deciding what counts as knowledge. From a cat’s height, humans look less noble and more frantic—creatures worshipping paper, mistaking accumulation for meaning, calling their anxiety “ambition” because it sounds respectable.
Howard’s background matters here. He didn’t drift into this as a novelty act; he’s an English literature PhD who’s written poetry, and you can feel that training in the way he prizes compression and rhythm over plotty theatrics. He writes like someone who’s spent too long inside language to believe in easy slogans. The voice is playful when it wants to be, but it’s never plush. It keeps slipping the knife in where the sentiment would usually go.
Then The Ghost Cat turns the screw. This isn’t the standard “animal helps humans heal” loop. Grimalkin, a cat in an Edinburgh tenement, dies and returns, living out nine lives across more than a century. That structure is the point: Howard refuses the pet-as-therapist fantasy and gives you the pet as witness. A tenement is not a cosy nook; it’s a social cross-section with walls thin enough to carry hunger, shame, and secrets. The cat moves through decades while humans cycle in and out, trying to remake themselves, failing, leaving traces. Edinburgh changes costumes—wars, modernity, technology, new manners—while the same old power dynamics keep their teeth.
The “cute animal narrator” trend sells innocence as a product; Howard uses a cat’s gaze to strip innocence off the city and show the machinery underneath.
What makes Howard interesting isn’t that he’s “charming.” It’s that he understands charm as a weapon—something culture uses to launder discomfort. He keeps the charm, sure, but he uses it as bait. You think you’re here for whimsy and end up stuck with questions about time, memory, and who gets to be remembered at all. He writes cats not as symbols of purity, but as angles of vision: low to the ground, unimpressed by status, attentive to what humans try to ignore.
And he sets it firmly in Edinburgh, not in the brochure version with cobbles and candlelight, but in the working reality: institutions, close-packed housing, the quiet brutality of class. The cat-eye view is perfect for that. Cats slip through boundaries people treat as sacred—private/public, respectable/shameful, upstairs/downstairs—and that mobility makes human rules look like what they are: agreements that benefit the already safe.
There’s also something mildly feral in Howard’s author persona: the scholar-poet turned storyteller who refuses to stay in one lane, who can write an apparently slight premise and load it with teeth. He’s not writing “cat books.” He’s writing about humans who can’t bear direct mirrors, so he hands them a cat and lets the reflection happen sideways.
Howard doesn’t ask you to love his cats so you’ll love yourself; he asks you to see the city through them until you can’t unsee what you’ve been training yourself to ignore.
So no, this isn’t the assembly line. This is Edinburgh watched by creatures who don’t care about your narratives of progress, redemption, or respectability. If you want your animal book to tuck you in and pat your head, go buy the mass-produced comfort. Howard’s cats aren’t here to soothe you. They’re here to stare you awake.
