Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Arthur Davis

Arthur lives in New York City where he is a management consultant in corporate planning and reorganization. He lectures extensively to CEO’s on leadership skills and has appeared as an expert witness on best business practices for the New York State and U.S. governments. Arthur has also published fiction prolifically: 11 novels and more than 130 short stories in many genres.

“I Have Become the Leopard” is controversial by its very nature: it revives the genre of the classic fable as a kind of prose epic. Some readers accept the genre; others are quite allergic to the stories of Æsop and La Fontaine, not to mention a massive amount of classic children’s literature.

“I Have Become the Leopard” joins John G. Hancock’s “Cerberus” and Chris Bailey’s “The Reckoning,” both also in this issue, as a cautionary tale on the border of life and death. The premise is reincarnation: a soul finds itself reincarnated as a leopard and lives a leopard’s normal life while aware of its previous existences as other animals of many different kinds.

The conclusion comes in the form of a classic fable’s moral. In this case, being an animal is far preferable to being human. Why might that be? Animals, the story shows, have a natural ethos all their own, one that fits the process of life: to eat and be eaten. Thus, animals kill to eat. Only man kills for abstractions, such as poachers’ taking an elephant’s tusks for money.

Arthur Davis’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Arthur. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!