RIP Scoot

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meet The Big Lebowski in this literary mystery that asks us to examine what stories, real or fiction, become the metaphors we use for working through our own challenges and uncertainties.

Twentysomething Austin lives alone in a crumbling office-turned-studio apartment of a former mops, brushes and brooms factory in Toronto. After a deformed and lice-ridden cat turns up at his door, then abruptly dies three weeks later, Austin begins to find frightening coincidences connecting him to a squatter living in his local Walmart, a botanical garden in Missouri, a shipping route from Greece, a muralist in Japan, the world of an online dystopia and more. As the obsession with piecing together the mystery surrounding his dead pet, and the reward the cat is potentially worth, takes over, Austin confronts his financial and family issues, his self-imposed isolation and his abandoned sense of direction. He discovers what purpose this mystery might actually serve in helping him cope with, and potentially recover, all that he’s really lost.

In the end, RIP Scoot is as much a story about an anomalous dead cat as it is a rich, conscientious depiction of grief, complicated relationships and the choices that occur when fighting change is no longer an option.

“R.I.P. Scoot is an unpredictable charmer—a shaggy-dog story about a patchy cat. Sara Flemington writes like a kookier Paul Auster, exploring the mysteries of coincidence, obsession, and grief with sweet, strange prose.”

“The characters in Sara Flemington’s R.I.P. Scoot meander through their lives in search of meaning in much the same way as Flemington herself stumbles into her sentences, discovering each word as though she had no idea it was going to be there until it was suddenly there; as though stumbling across each subsequent word is as surprising to her, and so to her reader, as finding at the door of your apartment ‘a three-and-a-half-pawed, no-eyed cat.’ I didn’t want this novel to end—and in a way, it didn’t. Finishing the book was like coming to a place where it was time to stop reading and go out into the world with this new, generous sense of love and openness bequeathed to me by Sara Flemington. R.I.P. Scoot makes my heart sing. It makes me feel less afraid, more hopeful. I’m grateful to the universe for sending it my way.”

–Ken Sparling, author of Not Anywhere, Just Not

“Sara Flemington’s delightfully eccentric novel is a mural of clues strung together with shoelaces, guitar strings, and hilarious logic. Follow R.I.P. Scoot’s disappearing red-bean-scented pawprints as it trespasses time zones, borders, and the boundaries between what is human and what is animal, and what is alive or dead. Let this misfit sphinx of a novel scoot through the broken window of your feral, tender heart.”