Sharp Teeth

An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing. Bent on dominance, rival factions are initiating the down-and-out of L.A. into their ranks. Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kindhearted, lovesick dogcatcher, and the object of his affection: a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Barlow's gut-wrenching, sexy debut, a horror thriller in verse, follows three packs of feral dogs in East L.A. These creatures are in fact werewolves, men and women who can change into canine form at will (Dog or wolf? More like one than the other/ but neither exactly). Lark, the top dog in one of the packs who's a lawyer in human form, has a master plan that may involve taking over the city from the regular humans. Anthony Silvo, a dogcatcher and normally a loner, finds himself falling in love with a beautiful and mysterious woman (Standing on four legs in her fur,/ she is her own brand of beast). A strange small man and his giant partner play tournament bridge and are deep into the drug trade. A detective, Peabody, investigates several puzzling dog-related murders. The irregular verse form with its narrative economies proves an excellent vehicle to support all these disparate threads and then tie them together in the bittersweet conclusion. 5-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Barlow's debut novel innovatively mixes horror, noir, and epic poetry, creating a uniquely thrilling read. Ruled by competing packs of werewolves, the seedy underside of LA is far stranger than anyone ever imagined. Lycanthropes hire themselves out as hit men and pushers, both driving and feeding off the criminal world. At the center of the story is Anthony Silvo, a self-professed loner and dogcatcher who falls in love with a mysterious woman; she leads a second life as a werewolf and works for Lark, the leader of the most dangerous werewolf pack on the streets. Her growing relationship with Anthony causes her to regret the wild choices of her past and seek out a new life. Meanwhile, Lark suspects that competing packs of lycanthropes are after his power and he prepares for a massive, citywide conflict. Other subplots include a detective's investigations into werewolf-related murders and a comic bridge tournament that might have ties to the LA drug trade. Some readers might be initially intimidated by Barlow's free-verse poetry, but, after a page, they will be swept into the rhythm. It's also to Barlow's credit that the touching moments between the woman and Anthony work as powerfully as the most graphic violence in the story. The dark humor and grim story line will immediately draw in fans of other neo-horror novels, such as Christopher Moore's You Suck: A Love Story (Morrow, 2007), but Barlow's deeper style is wholly his own.—Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

In a cheeky nod to epic poetry, Barlow’s début novel is written entirely in free verse and concerns a metamorphosis, of humans into wolves, in Los Angeles. No slaves to the moon, these postmodern lycanthropes do a thousand situps at a time and choose when to "self-ignite." (There are lapses: a grease-sensitive type inadvertently commits a massacre at Popeye’s.) The story involves a white-collar pack run by a Sun Tzu-style strategist that operates like a cross between a ruthless law firm and the Lakers; a plot to infiltrate animal shelters and high-end bridge tournaments; and a dog catcher who unknowingly falls in love with a werewolfess. Barlow deftly sketches the L.A. landscape—stucco, sun beating through smog, tract-home meth labs, fresh-cut lawns that "hiss with wealth," freeways that devour hours of life—and metes out his tale in noirish koans: "Watch any man’s eyes / at the bounce of a ball. / His head tilts slightly sideways, just a hair, / as a primitive focus / comes to life." Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Tremendous.... As ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it’s about identity, community, love, death, and all the things we want our books to be about. ”

Scott Smith, author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan

“If Ovid had been raised on a steady diet of Marvel Comics, Roger Corman and MTV, he might’ve written something like Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth.”

Michael Moorcock

“Forget any reservations you might have about werewolf stories or verse novels. This is great, engaging, wonderful stuff. Sondheim should make it his next musical.”

Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and What-the-Dickens

“A sexy, dark and (well, yes) biting story told by a wizard of sleight of hand.”

Christopher Moore

“I’m impressed. I always knew stuff like this was going on in L.A. What a cool book!”

David Mamet

“I like this book - lycanthropy indeed begins at home.”

Wall Street Journal

“Romeo and Juliet, werewolf-style.”

From the Back Cover

An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing as the initiated convince L.A.'s down and out to join their pack. Paying no heed to moons, full or otherwise, they change from human to canine at will—and they're bent on domination at any cost.Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kind-hearted, besotted dogcatcher, and the girl he loves, a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack. Anthony has no idea that she's more than she seems, and she wants to keep it that way. But her efforts to protect her secret lead to murderous results.Blending dark humor and epic themes with card-playing dogs, crystal meth labs, surfing, and carne asada tacos, Sharp Teeth captures the pace and feel of a graphic novel while remaining "as ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it's about identity, community, love, death, and all the things we want our books to be about" [Nick Hornby, The Believer].

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Elizabeth HandVampires have been the ascendant pop monster ever since Anne Rice's 1976 bestseller Interview with the Vampire. 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.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. Much will be made of the book's form -- it's told in free verse -- but that seems like a gimmick here. 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. 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.Anthony, 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:It's the same bar, the first one, the dark one, Anthony is sitting there sore as hell he wrestled a Saint Bernard today . . . "Is this seat taken?" she asks. There she is. Dark hair. Cautious blue eyes.Great.She looks at him a little too intently, a subdued version of the look you'd expect to get when you finally met your stalker. The girl is never named. 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." In Barlow's world, shape-shifting isn't governed by the moon's cycles. 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. Sharp Teeth's plot is tightly constructed, if nothing new: rival dog packs fighting over control of drugs, money, power. The cast of characters is similarly drawn from noir stereotypes -- good cop, bad dog, really bad dog. Still, any great noir lives or dies by its stylishness, and Sharp Teeth has got that in spades. Barlow's writing begs to be read aloud by Kathleen Turner, and he has a nice way of nailing his point in a few choice words -- "Anytime you got toy poodles breeding with coyotes/ it's gonna get interesting." Best of all, his evocation of the various packs' dynamics rings true. There's the white collar pack, drawn from upscale law firms; the streetwise thugs who lay waste to Mom and Pop meth labs; and, most memorably, a group of surfers who cross the border into Mexico, where they fall prey to humans running a dogfight ring. Their canine revenge upon those tormenters should trouble Michael Vick's sleep for years to come.Supernatural tropes tend to mirror cultural fears and fashions. Anne Rice's elegant undead made the transition from 1970s decadence to 1980s AIDS anxiety; the recent crop of cinematic and literary zombies staggers across a blighted landscape that seems to be the unavoidable legacy of global warming. Sharp Teeth draws blood in its nimble dissection of the current vogue for dogs, whose profile has expanded from Man's Best Friend to include Girl's Favorite Accessory. Barlow reminds us that even the goofiest golden retriever can become a wild thing under the wrong circumstances. And let's not even get started on pit bulls.Barlow, an ad executive and contributor to the Huffington Post, has said that he wrote Sharp Teeth to appeal to the ADD generation, readers who don't want to be bothered with excess adjectives or punctuation. His success at this is a mixed blessing. The novel often feels more like a film treatment, especially as it pants breathlessly toward a conclusion in which hordes of dogs, good and bad, fight tooth and claw against men armed with night-vision goggles and assault rifles.Still, along the way there are some lovely insights into what binds us to the canine tribe we've lived alongside for thousands of years. "Everyone/ has a dog story to tell," Barlow writes:in all these tales the dog is the innocent shooting starwe all wish uponuntil it burns up, aging fast and disappearingbehind our jagged horizons.Each dog marks a section of our lives, andin the end, we feed them to the dark, burying them there while we carry on. Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sharp TeethBy Toby BarlowHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2008 Toby BarlowAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780061430220Chapter OneLet's sing about the man thereat the breakfast tablebrown skin, thin features, white T,his olive hand making endless circlesin the classifieds"wanted" "wanted" "wanted"small jobs little moneybut you have to start somewhere.Here.LAEast LAa quarter mile from where they pick up the mariachison warm summer nightstwo miles from La Serenata de Garibaldi'swhere the panther black cars pause on their hauncheswhile their blonde women eat insidewiping the blood redmole from their quiet lips"wanted" "wanted" "wanted"he circles the paperthen reaches for the phonebreathes deep, begins."nope, sorry""job was taken already, good luck""you got experience?""leave a message""forgettaboutit""you sound Mexican, ola, you Mexican?""call back Monday""mmmn, I don't know nothing about that""no""no""no"Then his barbed hook catches. A thin gold veinis struck. Buds of hope crack through the dry white earth:"oh sure, come on by, what's your name?"Dogcatcher.His father was not a man but a sleepy bullwith sledgehammer hands and a soft heart.He once brought a dog home from the poundfor Anthony.Sipping coffee by the phone nowthat little yapping note of hope still rings in his ears.Anthony smiles, remembering the waythe puppy sat between his father's strong legsas they stood looking down like godsat the cowering little creature.They laughed. The pup relaxed,wagged its fat tail.His father was kind to the dog, to the kids, to his wifeuntil a week later when he went through the windshieldon Sepulveda. Hit so hardit didn't matter where he landed.And after that nothing was kindit was every man for himselfand there were no menjust a widow, some kidsand a dog who went back to the pound,taking his chances with no chance at all.C'est la guerre.Pondering his path,Anthony wonders now,if maybe that dogwasn't just some real bad luck."Packs of thirty or forty at a timewander looselike gauchos in their own damn ghost town.They come from the hills, up from the arroyos.We don't know how many, estimates vary,but each time they come ina few house dogs go back with them.Anytime you got toy poodles breeding with coyotesit's gonna get interesting."Calley is so white, he's redwith blanched features pickled and burned.He shows Anthony how to wrangle, how to pull hoops, slip a wire.They sit at the firing range. "You'll be shooting tranqs,but might as well practice with live rounds." Calley showsbite marks on his hands, legs and arms.His breath bites too: coffee, cigarettes, and just plain old rancid."I'll ride partner with you for a bit, but with all the cutbacksthey're making us all ride solo now.""What happens if I hit a pack?""Hit a pack, hit the radio." Calley pauses, draws on a smokethe red in his eyes almost matches theblood vessels spidering across his faceIt's a foggy, milky, bloodshot stare,but it still holds a mean light.He rasps, "You like dogs?""Yeah, sure.""Mmmn," he nods. "You won't."The "animal control" logo makes Anthony wonder.Animals have no control, they run, they fuck, they eat,they kill to fuck, they kill to eatand they sleep in the noonday sun.Anthony's not afraid of the dogs,he's not afraid of the work,he just hates the other guys.He sits apart, trying to stay clean.Perhaps over time he will become like themwith their permanent stains and bitter dispositions.But Christ almighty, he thinks,I hope not.Continues...Excerpted from Sharp Teethby Toby Barlow Copyright © 2008 by Toby Barlow. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Toby Barlow is executive creative director at the advertising agency JWT in Detroit and a contributor to the literary magazine n+1 and the Huffington Post. He splits his time between Detroit, Michigan, and New York City. Sharp Teeth is his first book.

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