Night Goblins

A 2016 Craigslist listing, opening with a blunt plea for someone to adopt a kitten, first brought The Ditch Kitty to public attention. The orange kitten had been pulled from a roadside ditch, and he quickly made his rescuer's days miserable. Once the post spread online, people embraced the little orange menace, though almost none of them could have known the man behind the ad.

The memoir traces that man's past from childhood, when he was a boy desperate to get away from an abusive home and tried to end his life at ten. He later became a soldier, then carried PTSD, alcoholism, and a reckless streak that led him to cause a fatal crash that took the life of a stranger. When he first encountered The Ditch Kitty, he was out of prison and out of work, stuck on a book he could not finish, and waiting for a child to be born whom he felt unfit to raise.

Written by JT Gregory, the book is a personal account of trauma, guilt, and self-loathing, with an orange kitten at its center. It asks who the real problem is and who ends up rescuing whom.