A zoo disaster story somehow even duller than Jurassic Park: "Dominion" by Lauren Acampora (BASS 2025)

True to my word, I'm at least going to try to blog through Best American Short Stories again this year, even though I'm scheduled to begin law school in little over two weeks. Maybe it'll take me a full ten months--until BASS comes out next year--to finish. Maybe I won't make it through at all. Maybe I'll drop out of law school in two weeks like I did twenty-five years ago. Who knows? 

I've been reading old editions of law books to get ready for school. When I can't possibly read any longer, and don't have it in me to do anything else productive either, I figure I might as well read a BASS story. I decided to do that two weeks ago, but the first story was such a chore to read, I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

In concept, it's a bog-standard lit fic story. It's fine. Take a former CEO of an oil company who is self-delusional enough to think that his retirement project of a zoo proves that he was always pro-environment, even though he oversaw an oil spill that destroyed a wide patch of ocean. Situate his delusion within the old Judeo-Christian belief that humanity was assigned by God to rule over the natural world, to "have dominion" over it, in the words of the Book of Genesis. Then show how his belief in dominion is frustrated, both by a natural world that resists dominion by insisting on being wild, and also by showing how wobbly his dominion or rule of the human world is.  

One main purpose of this blog is to provide explanations of literary short stories to people who might not be literature majors, who might read the stories and think, "What was the point of that?" The paragraph above is a pretty succinct explanation of the point of this story. It seems like an idea that's worth working through, but in practice, the story was so grating, I found myself reaching for the soothing comfort of property law. 

Contempt

Easily the greatest weakness in the story, the thing that undid any intellectual or emotional impact it might have made, was the attitude of contempt "Dominion" had for its own main character, Roy. ("Roy" means "king!" Kings have dominion! Did you get that? Since the story thought its readers were too stupid to get the "dominion" reference without shoehorning the exact Bible passage into the narrative, I am surprised it didn't also give us an etymology of Roy's name.)  

The narrative is told in third-person limited. That means that all of the opinions expressed in the narrative are Roy's, and Roy just can't help himself from noticing all of the shortcomings in others. Right off the bat, when he is looking at the drawings the students in his granddaughter's kindergarten did of his tiger, Molly, after Roy brought the tiger to their school, he sees them as "inept." There is hardly a page where Roy isn't judging someone. If he isn't judging, he's explaining away his own behavior. 

Roy assumes that he was meant to be part of the ruling class that his favorite part of Genesis establishes. He sees himself as qualitatively superior to the people he hires to run his backyard zoo. "Satisfied by the simple things the natural world provided, they were unaware of or indifferent to the higher calibers of human pleasures." He has a sort of Rousseau-like belief in their simple goodness and, along with it, in the simple goodness of nature. Because he believes that "nature," both in animal and lesser-human forms, is there for him to rule, he overlooks the ways in which it escapes his grasp.

There are examples of Roy self-justifying or looking down on others on nearly every page, but maybe the hospital, when he goes to see the girl who was attacked by one of the servals in his zoo, provides the clearest example. When Roy walks in to meet the girl's family, he sees "the bald father with his derelict patch of hair beneath his lip, the peroxide-blond mother, the greasy brother." Then, as if we didn't already understand that Roy thinks he's above these people, just a little below that, Roy "saw the dark roots at her scalp, noticed the cheap quality of her blouse, a mass-produced sort of tie-dye print."

Doctrine and reality

The story is supposed to give us irony, where Roy thinks he's in charge but finds he isn't at all. Not only do his animals insist on being wild, so does the older brother of the girl who was attacked. The boy asserts his dominance over Roy in the hospital room, gorilla-like. I suppose this is supposed to be a millenarian view of the future, in which the working classes rise up to reassert their mastery over the self-appointed rulers. 

There are two reasons this story doesn't work, and in fact was so boring it took a week to read. Neither has anything to do with the fact that I knew on page one that there would be an animal attack, and that as soon as Roy suggested the kids come to his zoo, that one of them would be the victim. 

The first is that the story just can't survive all that contempt for its own main character. One reason so few horror stories work for me is that I just don't care about the characters enough to be interested in whether they live or get cut up by the villain. It's true of this disaster story, too. Roy is there so the story has a symbol of corporate greed and destruction of the environment to whip. There isn't even an attempt to make him anything other than odious. 

The second reason is hinted at in the story, but not followed through with. Roy used to be frustrated with his daughter for being mad at him for his job as CEO of an oil company because it ruined the environment, but then hypocritically accepting the benefits of being the daughter of a rich man. This could be a very strong balance to the way the story is punching at Roy the whole time: It could be offering the view of reality offsetting the idealistic shade it is throwing at Roy. But the story fails to accept its own invitation.  

At one point, Roy is eating a steak sandwich while meditating on the wonders of animals, an obvious example of his hypocrisy, as he both professes to love animals but also is fine eating them. It reminded me of something I saw a few weeks ago. After Mamdani won the election for mayor in New York (or maybe it was right before the election, I don't remember), I saw a story where a reporter asked him for his favorite places to eat in New York. Mamdani mentioned a beef dish at one place and a lamb dish at another. The comments seemed to all accept these answers as appropriately hip and worthy of the symbol of a new left hope. I was just wondering why an audience of presumably pro-environment commenters didn't take him to task for eating the two animals that, by far, cause the most greenhouse gas emissions per ounce of any kind of meat one can eat. 

The fact is that idealists often betray their own beliefs when they are paired with something else they believe in or want. Roy is driving at the end of the story, and he thinks to himself how much he hates traffic. It's supposed to be ironic, as Roy, the former head of an oil company, is now hoisted on his own petard, forced to live in the mess he's made. But it takes two sides to made a traffic jam or to ruin the environment through oil: both the supply and the demand. Roy was only responsible for the supply. We all provide the demand. You want to wring your hands about the wee baby seals when there's an oil spill? Cool. You going to stop driving your car as a result? No? Then don't write stories about how CEOs of oil companies are the problem. 

This is the real reason this story was such a dreary bore to read. It's an attempt to whip Roy and and people like him, but it doesn't deal with the reality it would take to rip power away from them. It would take all of us giving something up, changing how we live. I know one reason I've never been much good at living like that is because whenever I start to try, I realize nobody else is doing it, so there's no point. Also, it's really, really hard. I have probably "given up" meat two hundred times in my life. Then I realize I hate food for a while until I give up. 

A story doesn't always have to provide an answer. It can, instead, merely shine a light on what the problem is. But "Dominion" doesn't face up to the problem. Instead, it gives us a false answer, which is that Roy is the problem, and if we just stand up to the Roys of the world and put them in their place, their false dominion will end. It won't. 

As a final aside, I will say that because I read this story in the middle of much reading of law books, I thought of a much better title than "Dominion." It should have been called "Strict Liability." Only don't explain the title to everyone like this story did.