SHARP TEETH by Toby Barlow (Harper Perennial, 2009; first published in UK, 2007, and in US by HarperCollins Publishers, 2008)
L.A.
Werewolves
Werewolves in packs
Pack warfare
A love story
A cop on the trail
A crime boss
A novel written in free verse.
A quick description makes you think it shouldn’t work. But it does. When you get past the verse layout,
Sharp Teeth reads like a good crime story by someone like Elmore Leonard or Lawrence Block. The novel mainly follows Lark, the leader of a pack, and some members of his pack, showing how Lark thinks, how he keeps the pack together and in harmony, and what a pack does to prosper and remain secret in a world of men. What I found appealing, though, was how many of the characters, major and minor, Barlow gave interior lives – it’s not all about action, sometimes the characters think, and Barlow is very good at presenting those thoughts in concise, memorable lines:
Pg.65: Anthony contemplating the woman who is briefly called Betty,
“Morning and she’s sitting in the bright kitchen
wearing his robe, stirring her tea.
How is it? How is this so? How is she here?
Her body worn delicious in exhaustion,
wrapped in wisps of his scent.
But wondering how long it can last.
We are all china barely mended,
clumsily glued together
just waiting
for the hot water and lemon
to seep through our seams.”
Pg85: Bone thinking about his night with Sasha,
“Bone almost wishes she hadn’t been there.
It’s like she only came into his world
to show him how empty it would be
without her.”
Pg92: “Betty” while driving,
“In the car, the rap song has every other word beeped out
as if the small words themselves were a dangerous thing, and not
the ideas of violence and waste and ridiculous luxury
that the songs clutch in their rough embrace.
Everyone is always looking in the wrong direction,
we worry about our lovers while losing our jobs
we stress out about cancer while our children run away
we ponder the stars while burning the earth.
Lark used to say the bullet we’re running from
is almost never the one that hits us.”
Sharp Teeth leans more toward dark fantasy than horror, and the thought behind it is even somewhat science fictional in its working out of the dynamics of lycanthropy in the contemporary world. While a few scenes are grisly, the overall impact comes from examining the intersection of humanity and werewolf, pack and larger society, particularly criminal society, and can be seen as an alternate perspective on what Guy Endore created in
The Werewolf of Paris. The novel could have become allegorical of gang life and warfare, and there certainly is that looming in the background, but over and again, Barlow suppresses that reading by sounding the grace note that makes a short-term character more real, that appeals to some common humanity beneath the fur, while still making it clear that there are hard times coming and not all the characters will survive. And while the real pleasure of the book for me stems from Barlow’s insight into character, the final meeting between enemy packs and the individual confrontations that result round off the story neatly and more than satisfactorily.
Other recent werewolves:
“Boobs” by Suzy McKee Charnas
“The Revel” by John Langan
(You'll have to scroll down to find the messages, numbers 12 and 3, respectively.)
Next:
American Morons by Glen Hirshberg
