The most radical thing about Sharp Teeth (Harper Collins, 320 pages, $24.95) isn’t the story that Toby Barlow has come up with — though it is suitably gonzo — it’s that Harper Collins published a 320-page epic poem in hardcover. It happens as often as there are good books about werewolves.
As Sharp Teeth’s broken lines have it, an ancient race of lycanthropes has set up shop in contemporary Los Angeles, living on the fringes as a gang of criminals and meth cookers, until a double-cross sends the pack’s leader into hiding as a suburban pet. Also in the mix is a love-that-dare-not-bark-its-name plot between a dogcatcher who’s not cut out for the severity of his job and the werewoman he falls hard for.
The disastrous possibilities of these plots have already been goofily explored in dime store–shamanistic crap like Wolfen, in post–Robert Bly crap like the 1994 dog of a Jack Nicholson movie Wolf and even in CanCon crap like Skinwalkers. Barlow’s method for avoiding those fates is to keep his story through line focused on gristly reality, as when the gang reminisces, “They still talk about Bone and what the grease does to him / He can’t go into fried chicken places / the smell, the scent, turns his blood right away / They say he took out a Popeyes once / It made the news, unsolved / It took him an hour / He walked in, just to pick up a bucket / the smell hit, the change happened / and the whole place had to go / Chicken, customers, biscuits, and gravy.” (This is also probably the only favourable review a Popeyes has ever received.)
Though there are too many epigrams — Barlow breaks the Walter Benjamin and Warren Zevon rule that states you can quote one or the other but never both on the same page — and his plot is, on the face of it, quite silly, Sharp Teeth tells a stone cold noir story in wonderfully cruel language with sudden turns. Barlow achieves a kind of a B-movie Zen state when he writes, “What are you — were his final words / the gun’s loud report / shook through the house / Fucking idiot / She heard footsteps and crouched down, still naked, waiting / A man came into the room with a gun / one blink died one blink / as she fired she thought / what bodyguard ever ran toward / a bullet like that loser just did? / What a moron / What a complete fucking moron.”
If you want to read deeply, Barlow has dropped hints throughout of the tensions between competing ecologies and civilization’s grim contracts. Despite all its gallons of spilt blood, Sharp Teeth also, surprisingly, has heart and brain matter.