Sharp Teeth's plot is tightly constructed, if nothing new: rival dog packs fighting over control of drugs, money, power. It's a matter of will and discipline and an exchange of blood, loosely inspired by Native American lore but more influenced by the terse macho prose of Chuck Palahniuk - think Dogfight Club. In Barlow's world, shape-shifting isn't governed by the moon's cycles. She's an alpha dog, the sole female member of a pack of lycanthropes (Barlow shies away from the down-market term 'werewolf') who favor limos and Tag Heuer watches in their human form, and whose canine predilections can be summed up as 'Blood, fat, marrow, grease, sinew, muscle, guts, hide, fur, sleep.' Cautious blue eyes.Ī subdued version of the look you'd expect to get It's the same bar, the first one, the dark one,

There's an amusing shout-out to 'Beowulf' in its opening lines ('Let's sing about the man there/ at the breakfast table'), but otherwise Sharp Teeth roams predictably, if enjoyably, within the well-trodden dog park of Los Angeles noir.Īnthony, a down-on-his-luck dogcatcher, is a figure familiar to any reader of hardboiled fiction, the loner who parks himself at the kind of bar where you know it's just a matter of time before The Girl walks in: Give or take a few punctuation marks, Sharp Teeth could just as easily have been written in prose, though that would have resulted in a far slimmer volume.

Much will be made of the book's form - it's told in free verse - but that seems like a gimmick here. Toby Barlow's briskly entertaining first book, Sharp Teeth, aims to put lycanthropes first in the supernatural sweepstakes, with a narrative as relentless and powerful as a pitbull's jaws. Werewolves have always been the underdog, despite high-profile lycanthropes in the Harry Potter books and Stephenie Meyer's popular Twilight series for young adults.

Vampires have been the ascendant pop monster ever since Anne Rice's 1976 bestseller Interview with the Vampire.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow