At a certain point, reading Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth in bars
and coffee shops, I just started lying when people asked me what it was
about. “Oh, it’s about, um, savagery in the urban landscape, and the
metaphorical wilderness within all of us. And… dogs. Nick Hornby gave
it a great write-up in The Believer.”
Hornby did in fact rave about Sharp Teeth, but what I was
avoiding saying is this: “It’s a free-verse poem about werewolves. And
it’s good.”
Those sentences, in conjunction, induce a level of cognitive
dissonance in most people that can probably only be overcome by reading
the book.
In Barlow’s surprising first novel, contemporary Los Angeles is
secretly inhabited by packs of men who can, at will, transform
themselves into dogs. (The idea that werewolves only transform at the
full moon, we are told, is “as ancient and ignorant as any myth.”) The
packs work various angles, hiring themselves out as muscle to oblivious
crime lords, or laying plans to infiltrate the financial markets of
“white-collar” LA—but when one dog betrays his pack, carefully
laid plans dissolve and a revenge-fueled bloodbath is unleashed on dogs
and people alike. A little human interest is provided by a good-hearted
dogcatcher and a bumbling cop, inadvertent participants in a story they
don’t quite understand—and when the dogcatcher falls in love with
a werewolf? Well, it just doesn’t get any more star-crossed than
that.
The book’s got the tight plot, simplified characters, and brisk
pacing of a horror novel, but all excess fat has been stripped from the
narrative: There’s none of the clunky, purple prose you’d expect from a
novel about packs of roving werewolves. Barlow’s bare-bones verses
propel the reader urgently from one scene to the next; it’s a finely
tuned plot engine, an acknowledgement that when reading a page-turner,
the faster the pages turn, the better.
Sex, gore, methamphetamines, and the sordid glamour of Los
Angeles—it’s all here, audaciously packaged as an epic poem. And
somehow, it works: The book’s absurdly pretentious structure and
absurdly pulpy premise transcend one another, reaching a totally
bizarre and highly readable accord. ALISON HALLETT