'Sharp Teeth': A Ferociously Good Read

Toby Barlow's first novel, Sharp Teeth, starts out scary. Not because it's about werewolves -- in gangs, in Los Angeles -- though I guess that's part of it. No, the main thing is the free verse trailing down the pages. At first glance, it looks Odyssey of the Ancient Waste Land scary, a whole lot of hard work.

But then I started to read. And I thought, "Hey, this isn't hard at all! It's interesting. Kind of fun." And I did just what Nick Hornby did: "I looked at the first page, got to the bottom of it, turned it over, read the second page, and ..." kept reading. Faster and faster. Straight through to the end. And then I started flipping back through the best parts.

See, this book is really good. It's got Raymond Chandler atmosphere and James Ellroy tension, surfer dudes and drug smugglers and a nervous, not-yet-old lady from Pasadena. It's got blood and violence and betrayal and corruption, but it's also got all the loyalty that a pack of werewolves -- who, it turns out, sometimes have a lot in common with dogs -- can bring. It's got Anthony, a gentle guy from East L.A. who takes a job as a dogcatcher just as the werewolves are getting down to business. And because it's got Anthony, along with a lonely she-wolf, it's got one of the most entrancing love stories I've encountered in a long time.

And yeah, it's got poetry. Most of the time the taut language pulls you along, deeper and deeper into the narrative, making you wonder why we ever bothered with prose in the first place. But every now and then a passage stops you cold. Here's Barlow on incest:

The world, as a result, turned backward

where blossoms buried themselves while

roots reached like starving fingers

to the grey and fruitless sky.

If you like a meaningful story, told dazzlingly well, read this book. Don't waste time with "I don't like fantasy" or "I don't like poetry" or "Isn't that a little weird?" Take my word for it. Or David Mamet's. Or Scott Smith's. Or again, Nick Hornby's, who wrote that Sharp Teeth is "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." It's that rare page-turner whose insights and imagery will resonate long after the book's back on the shelf, even when you can look again at the big dog snoozing at your feet and see just a furry companion who likes his ears scratched, just so.

Toby Barlow and reporter Rick Kleffel recently discussed the writing of Sharp Teeth for NPR's Weekend Edition. A transcript of the story follows.

Liane Hansen: When Toby Barlow set out to write his first novel, Sharp Teeth, he knew he wanted to tell a story about love and werewolves in modern Los Angeles. But why did he choose to write it in free verse?

Toby Barlow: It's a tricky one to explain. You do have to get rid of, you know, a lot of initial resistance from people who just kind of roll their -- I mean, I had a hard time getting friends to read this.

Hansen: As Rick Kleffel from member station KUSP explains, Sharp Teeth pays homage to both Homer and monster movies. It's an epic love story, as well as a bloody tale of struggles for power.

Rick Kleffel: On the cover, the black silhouette of a dog with silver fangs snarls against a blood-red background. Inside, the stark simplicity continues as the story is told in free verse. Toby Barlow begins with a heroic portrait of a thin, brown-skinned man wearing a T-shirt.

Barlow: The first lines I wrote of the book are the first lines in the book which are, you know, let's sing about that man there.

Kleffel: Specifically, let's sing about the man there at the breakfast table, an unemployed resident of East L.A. who will soon find a job in the classifieds as a dogcatcher.

Barlow: And to me, it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke in reference to Homer. I'm a huge fan of The Iliad. I'm an enormous fan of The Odyssey. So it seemed to me a worthy ambition to say let's sing about something else. Let's sing about the dogcatcher. So it's a song of a common man in a very uncommon situation.