The story’s narrator is an animal lover but now he is an alcoholic and violent, begins mistreating his wife and his black cat Pluto. When Pluto attacks him in self-defense one night, he seizes the cat in a fury, cuts out one of its eyes, and hangs it. That night a fire destroys his house, leaving him in dire poverty. He later adopts a one-eyed black cat that he finds at a low-life tavern, but after he nearly trips on the cat, he attempts to kill it too. When his wife intervenes, he kills her instead and calmly conceals her in a wall. In the end the black cat reveals the narrator’s crime to the police.
