Book review: Sharp Teeth

[ninety6tears]

Toby Barlow’s thoroughly inspired debut novel is the only one in its category. A good-sized book told in the format of somewhat dauntingly bracketed prose, it tells of the layered mystery, violence and seediness surrounding the cult-like reigns of three packs of lycanthropes around Los Angeles, as well as everybody normal caught up in the unraveling mess of dog-eat-dog war.

Barlow is not the first to incorporate werewolf-like creatures that can change at will, or to have female characters able to become them, or to have good monsters as well as bad ones in this type of story. But even without the potentially alienating but rewarding element of telling the story in consistent prose, Sharp Teeth is a triumph in being unparalleled for its own tone, which mixes a haunting feel of inevitable destruction with the occasional vulnerable light of innocence, where it is deserved. One of the innocents is a never-named female character who is part of the least criminal of the packs we meet, until she falls in love with a dog-catcher named Anthony; despite the repeated warning that no one can emotionally or perhaps physically survive without a pack, she abandons her group to instant collapse and lives in constant fear that her boyfriend will find out what she truly is. This leaves her former leader Lark to try to put together a new pack in order to deal with the others he suspects to be competing for power in the area, and the first step is always to find a female.

One of the most inventive aspects of Barlow’s werewolves (or weredogs) is the somewhat mysterious and half-explained element of animalistic instincts in characters that are otherwise logical and human; the packs are not just gangs, some of which use their monstrous abilities to sustain a nocturnal existence of organized crime, but have modes of instinctive order much like wolves. There is usually only one female, who supports the motivation of the group by either never sleeping with any of the males but sort of intoxicating them with the possibility, or, in the somewhat shadier packs, offering sex as a reward for jobs well done. The dogs also have insatiable appetites even in their human forms, which is what makes them unintentionally dangerous if they take their canine form, like one member who “took out a Popeye’s once/. . .Chicken, customers, biscuits, and gravy.”

The actual language of the novel’s narrative prose, once one gets used to it, can be read without its form being a distraction, and in some parts the way a phrase is executed works either comically, evoking the dry attitude of a Frank Miller comic (“Anthony watches Callie walk through the open door,/ and disappear into the big black hole called/forget this fucking day”), or with a beautiful kind of unexpected poetry (“She watched the whole bus transform/row after row, man to dog, man to dog,/a deck of cards cascading over/to expose some devil’s tarot underneath”).

There are some points in Sharp Teeth that may make it seem too MTV for some people’s taste, what with sly pop culture references and almost every character having some wild nickname, but this is just the author having fun with pushing the limits of what people typically associate with sci-fi/fantasy. And I would say that he does so successfully; Sharp Teeth, if it manages to gain a good following, could do some part in reshaping the direction of fantasy literature.