Spoiler: The Dog Dies
Author Erin Lee is Raked Across the Coals for the Death of a (Fake) Dog
Not too long ago, indie author Erin Lee made a post on Threads that did not go over too well. Many who took issue with it were incensed by just the first line: “I killed a dog in my book & said there’s no afterlife.” Now, I know a lot of us had to read Where The Red Fern Grows as a kid and our whole brain chemistry is utterly altered because of it, but moving beyond our childhood feelings toward Big Dan and Little Ann, Erin Lee’s dead dog is fake. It’s fictional. It’s not a real dog. Lee must have been tossed right off her guard when she faced a wild amount of backlash even just for the first line of this post, her currently un-released book featuring the dog death receiving premature one-star reviews and her social media accounts flooded with angry commenters—upset that she had, in their minds (and only in their minds), killed a dog.
The rest of the post was fairly tone-deaf as well, with Lee listing off a bunch of examples of what she considers the “dire” state of “dog culture” including a writing video she watched warning authors to be careful when writing pets, a Beta reader whose boundaries to fiction excluded works in which a dog dies, and a guy on a dating profile who claimed her “no afterlife [for pets]” was a “hard pass.” She ended her post with “They’re not a child. Chill.” But…to a generation of millennials who’ve decided that kids would be an irresponsible burden on an over-encumbered Earth and their individual pocket books, we’re facing a new wave of parenthood—and these folks do not like being told that their “kids” aren’t deserving of the respect of strangers. This, coming on the heels of a viral video out of New York City depicting a kind little dog mauled nearly to death by two larger bully breeds with little to no legal recourse for the owner (because dogs are considered property, not loved ones), the post struck several exposed nerves and Lee’s book may not survive it. In fact, the very first comment on the post was from Threads user allisonmdickson which read, “Kristi Noem is that you?”, an allusion to Kristi Noem’s infamous account of murdering her own puppy for dubious reasons.
Over on BlueSky, user genxcrone stated, “So Erin Lee did something that she knew would hurt people, found out people don’t like being hurt and got mean and mad about it?” Meanwhile, wires were getting crossed all over the place and by the time a lot of us had gotten a hold of the proverbial telephone, we were sort of under the impression that this woman had literally, in the Kristi Noem sense, killed a dog. After all, Lee didn’t do anything to hurt anyone. All she did was write about a dog dying (and not going to heaven because okay, I guess) and say a relatively unpopular thing on the internet. OooOoooh, how terribly harmful…
Spoiler: the dog was not, in fact, real, and no actual real life tangible living dogs were harmed in the writing of Erin Lee’s book…presumably. Bluesky user hillarymonahan rambled on in a series of skeets about the personal importance of dogs in not just her own life due to her infertility but in the lives of others who struggle with self harm, claiming that they stay alive for their dogs who clearly regard them with unconditional love. While valid, these issues really aren’t something authors can help you with, and though posting about a general apathy toward our four-legged friends might be in someways distasteful, is it really something that warrants a barrage of one-star reviews on GoodReads for a book that hasn’t even come out yet? Most creatives on BlueSky were under the same banner: no. Though killing a dog in a narrative is certainly a choice, it’s not always the wrong one. Consider, for example, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time which prioritizes a rather ruthless killing of a dog toward whom the main character feels somewhat ambivalent. The murder of the dog is the central point that begins the small mystery and allows the whole narrative to unravel before our eyes as our intrepid main character works through the plot in his own way. For most of us, the story was less about the mystery of the dog and more about the development and understanding of the character. The dog dying was simply…necessary. Creatives aren’t particularly averse to killing whoever they need to within a narrative as long as it serves a purpose, or makes sense, and as for an afterlife…uh…who cares? They’re not real.
This ultimately comes back around to one of our most common issues: the conflation of harm and discomfort, the former of which has tangible effects that can manifest into real world consequences and the later of which just makes you a little bit squirmy for a while before you come to terms with it and accept that it’s not actually a big deal, you’re just making it into one. Now, could I date someone who didn’t at least pretend that we were all going to meet our beloved animals at the Rainbow Bridge? No. Probably not. So it’s not shocking that Lee’s prospective match might unmatch based on that particularity (assuming she actually believes that, as is implied). Is it harmful? No. It’s it a shitty thing to say? Yes. Naturally, Lee is going to have to deal with whatever comes from making a bad post on the internet, that’s just how it is these days, but maybe we could get less upset about things that have no bearing in reality and more upset about actual problems.