Looking Inside The Demon Cat

The cover page of the short play The Demon Cat.

The Cat in The Demon Cat by James R. Rooney.

An excerpt of the play with an illustration of The Cat. In the excerpt, Meegen interacts with The Cat alone after he attacks her parents and elderly neighbor and makes them flee.

The Demon Cat is a sixteen page play that takes place within an Irish cottage and the play involves four characters: Meg, Davy, Megeen, Mrs. M'Coul, and The Cat. Meg and Davy are a married couple with a daughter named Meegen and after Davy returns home with fish to sell in the market, Meg warns that The Cat may return to the cottage to eat all of the fish save for the scrawny ones. To prepare for The Cat's inevitable arrival, Meg retrieves a thick stick to hit The Cat with before joining Mrs. M'Coul, their elderly neighbor, to spin wool by the fireplace. At the same time, Davy leaves the cottage to spend some time at the local pub.

While Meegen sorts the fish by size, The Cat makes his entrance into the cottage and inquires about what he can eat. Meegen advances to The Cat in a moment of anger and after The Cat scratches her arm, Meg picks up her thick stick and makes an attempt to hit The Cat. Her attempt is foiled and as Davy returns home and strikes The Cat, the feline soon attacks all three of the humans once Mrs. M'Coul joins the fray. Each time The Cat attacks, the lights in the cottage darken to illuminate the feline's rage. Meegen remains at the cottage and realizes that although The Cat scratched her, she did not feel any pain and The Cat tiredly remarks that the scratch only causes pain if he wills it to. Meg, Davy, and Mrs M'Coul return to the cottage with holy water to pour onto The Cat and once they do so, Meegen is brought down to her knees in pain as the scratch begins to throb.

 Although Rooney does not use complicated wording in the play, The Demon Cat pushes the boundaries of normal reading practices because it forces the reader to look past the simple diction and consider the dark, strange theme behind it. The oddly humanized and penciled sketches of The Cat only add to the sinister theme of an evil entity colliding with and corrupting a pure soul. The theme is not explicity said in the text but readers can infer that once Meg is scratched by The Cat, she loses her purity and becomes fully corrupt once The Cat is adversely cleansed by the holy water. Although Meg makes the plain comment of "You scratched the girl." to The Cat, there is a deeper meaning behind the words that involve a young girl receving a blemish of wickedness from a demonic being.