My birthday happened recently and naturally there were books. One gift I got was something called Cats Gone Bad; based on the title and cover, I was thinking it would be a series of cat shaming photos and anecdotes like a pic-a-day calendar I had a few years ago called the “Bad Cat Calendar”. That is not what Cats Gone Bad is.
There are pictures but they’re mostly photoshopped cats in costumes, or actual pictures that are on the basic side, like a young Siamese kitty in a tree. There’s a caption that’s probably a pun of some sort (“Cat Barks Up Wrong Tree”), a quote implied to be attributed to either the kitty in the picture or caption (“Look, while you’re climbing up to rescue me, I’ll pussyfoot around for a while and then jump down on my own. OK?”), and some kind of anecdote that’s at least tangentially related to the above. Continuing the page for example, in this case, in 2014, one Carrie Courtney of Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, climbed up a tree to rescue her cat and got stuck herself. The fire department, who were called to rescue both treed individuals, apparently told Courtney that 9/10 if a cat looks stuck up a tree, it’s actually gong to find its own way down eventually.
The anecdotes are mostly not cats being “bad”, just weird. The puns aren’t really that funny. The pictures are mostly kind of bland. The same goes for the stories. There’s no real character or personality to much extent. This book was originally published in 2015, and has had 5 reprints. If I hadn’t seen this on the publication info page, I’d suspect AI of being the author “Kat Scratching”. How did this thing sell well enough to merit that many reprints? It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s not all that great either.