Sharp Teeth

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More About This Book

Overview

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 rnaks. Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kindhearted, lovesick dogcatcher, and the object of his affection: a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack.

"A howling, hole-digging, bone-snapping, blood-lapping, intestine-gobbling success." —NEW YORK magazine

"Magnificient....A kooky combo of grit, goofiness, and gusto." —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Briskly entertaining....Any great noir lives or dies by its stylishnes, and Sharp Teeth has got that in spades." —WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

"A sexy, dark, and (well, yes) biting story told by a wizard of sleight of hand." —GREGORY MAGUIRE, AUTHOR OF WICKED

"Sex, gore, methamphetamines, and the sordid glamour of Los Angeles—It's all here, audaciously packaged as an epic poem. And somehow it works." —PORTLAND MERCURY

"Extraordinary....A cross-species love story [wrapped] around anoir tale of drugs, murder, and revenge in Los Angeles so taut that you could floss with it." —THE TIMES (London)

"I always knew stuff like this was going on in L.A. What a cool book!" —CHRISTOPHER MOORE, AUTHOR OF FOOL

  • Sharp Teeth
    Sharp Teeth

Editorial Reviews

Elizabeth Hand
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…[it'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…
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics

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 2007 Reed Business Information
The Barnes & Noble Review
It was Jerry Seinfeld, in a sapient moment, who proposed the following: Imagine a Martian peering from the bridge of his flying saucer for a first view of Earth, and imagine his eye alighting on the common city scene of a dog taking its ease at a streetcorner, hovered anxiously about by a stooping human with a pooper-scooper. Of the two beings on display, Seinfeld wanted to know, which would that Martian assume was the higher? In planetary terms, who would he think was in charge?

The dog in the city is one of civilization's oxymorons, and the dog lover who is pure of heart will face this fact squarely. From the available literature one might instance here J. R. Ackerley's wonderful My Dog Tulip, first published in 1956, which records in fastidious prose the attempt of a London bachelor to allow his pet Alsatian the full and scented poetry of her nature, and the various embroilments that inevitably resulted. One misty September morning, for example, as the always-fascinated Ackerley is watching Tulip assume her characteristic "tripodal attitude" prior to defecating on a sidewalk in Putney, he is gruffly upbraided by a passing cyclist. "What's the bleeding street for?" shouts the man. "For turds like you!" shouts back Ackerley. "Bleeding dogs!" screams the cyclist. "Arseholes!" rejoins Ackerley. ("There was no more to be said," he later reflects. "I had had the last word.")

Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth is an urban man/dog clash of a different stripe. Written in loping half poetry (the term "free verse" doesn't really do justice to the long-range tautness of Barlow's technique), this extraordinary debut novel re-imagines doghood as a state of advanced criminality. Across greater Los Angeles, under the radar, men are turning into dogs and dogs into men. These transformations are not related to the cycles of the moon, nor do the transformed go raving around like werewolves (although they are happy to eat human flesh): they change at will, and as dogs they can pass for your average domestic hound. And most important, they know what they're doing: the dog-men are organized into packs and operate as muscle in the city's underworld, disrupting a drug ring here, assassinating (and then consuming) a competitor there. Sometimes they work as humans, sometimes as dogs -- either way the same stripped-down, food-first approach is taken to the business at hand. Admire the economy of motive here, for example, as a mixed canine/human crew invades a "mom-and-pop" meth lab and waits for the return of its owner:

The missing man comes through the door and his shopping bag full of milk and egg takes Ray's shotgun blast.
As the pack moves out, stepping over the spilled groceries and blood,
the dogs pause to lap the yolk and white from the floor then scamper to catch up to the pack.
What can we call this kind of writing? Action verse? Screenplay poetry? It is the idiom of movement, where there is no division between thought and deed. Christopher Logue used it, or something like it, in his translations of Homer. Ted Hughes, too, put it to work in his smoldering 1977 magical drama Gaudete; to a correspondent he wrote that he was looking for a style fit to be "slammed head on, repeatedly, into the obstinate actuality of objects, of point-blank situations, of things as they are." Barlow's contribution is to add a twist of L.A. noir: a dog's-eye view of the city, needless to say, is more hard-boiled than the most disenchanted of private dicks. ("The green lawns of Pasadena hiss with wealth.")

Sharp Teeth is a love story and a thriller, with a number of excellent subplots. In one of them the shape-shifter Lark, an ex-lawyer who has formalized the ethics of the pack into a sort of executive bushido ("Discipline from the inside..."), is forced to go underground for a spell, as a dog. With humanoid cunning he gets himself taken in by a nice lady named Bonnie, a gentle pill popper and wine drinker, who rubs him behind the ears and whose home is so very comfortable he almost loses his edge:

It was supposed to be a week. It's been six.
No rush, really,
the packs will still be there.
The war is waiting.
Just a little nap.
The war is always waiting for us.
As I said, it's a love story too. Anthony the dogcatcher falls for a beautiful shape-shifter, in ignorance of her true nature. Or is it ignorance? His love seems to reach to the bottom of her being, even if he is unaware that she nips off from time to time to make a meal of somebody.
Their love is eternal because time seems to have fled, embarrassed to be sharing such a small apartment with so much dumb affection.
In a city shared by dogs and humans, the greatest crime for both species is unattachment. The dog not owned, the person not loved or spoken for, is high risk: a coyote." After the hostile takeover of his first pack, which he had carefully assembled from the city's go-getting corporate layer, Lark adopts a different recruitment method. He trolls the New Age churches and the methadone clinics, the places where "the lost ones land like dandelion seeds"; he posts an ad offering 'Self-Reformation' on an extreme sports website. He approaches stray humans on park benches and promises them inexpressible fulfillments. Lycanthropic alpha male as cult leader -- it seems obvious now.

Let's end with a quick salute to HarperCollins, Barlow's publisher, who have gone out on a noncommercial limb with Sharp Teeth. The hardcover is beautifully designed in black and blood-red, and it does one good to see such expertise lavished on a verse novel about weredogs. Next: a sequence of 400 linked haiku, in which Seinfeld's Martian teleports a squatting city dog into his craft and interrogates him whimsically about the meaning of life on Earth. Seriously -- why not? --James Parker

James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press). He is a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061430220
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 1/29/2008
  • Pages: 320
  • Sales rank: 1,135,123
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet 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.

Read an Excerpt

Sharp Teeth

Chapter One

Let's sing about the man there
at the breakfast table
brown skin, thin features, white T,
his olive hand making endless circles
in the classifieds
"wanted" "wanted" "wanted"
small jobs little money
but you have to start somewhere.
Here.
LA
East LA
a quarter mile from where they pick up the mariachis
on warm summer nights
two miles from La Serenata de Garibaldi's
where the panther black cars pause on their haunches
while their blonde women eat inside
wiping the blood red
mole from their quiet lips
"wanted" "wanted" "wanted"
he circles the paper
then reaches for the phone
breathes 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 vein
is 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 bull
with sledgehammer hands and a soft heart.
He once brought a dog home from the pound
for Anthony.
Sipping coffee by the phone now
that little yapping note of hope still rings in his ears.
Anthony smiles, remembering the way
the puppy sat between his father's strong legs
as they stood looking down like gods
at the cowering little creature.
They laughed. The pup relaxed,
wagged its fat tail.
His father was kind to thedog, to the kids, to his wife
until a week later when he went through the windshield
on Sepulveda. Hit so hard
it didn't matter where he landed.

And after that nothing was kind
it was every man for himself
and there were no men
just a widow, some kids
and 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 dog
wasn't just some real bad luck.

"Packs of thirty or forty at a time
wander loose
like 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 in
a few house dogs go back with them.
Anytime you got toy poodles breeding with coyotes
it's gonna get interesting."
Calley is so white, he's red
with 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 shows
bite 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 cutbacks
they'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 smoke
the red in his eyes almost matches the
blood vessels spidering across his face
It'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 eat
and 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 them
with their permanent stains and bitter dispositions.
But Christ almighty, he thinks,
I hope not.

Sharp Teeth. Copyright © by Toby Barlow. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 4
( 37 )

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 22, 2008

    A reviewer

    By chance I say this book on a display at the door of B&N. I picked it up and read some of the quotes strewn about the cover and it sounded pretty interesting. Once I began reading I couldn't get away. You follow several people's stories concerning certain events that lead to a huge climax. Lot's of action, anticipation, elements of mystery, and stories of love all keep you tied in. Don't get me wrong, this is a story about werewolves. He brings lots of different things into a story told in a very modern way, which was an outstanding first book. I hope for and expect more.

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 29, 2008

    One of the best books I've read so far

    All I can say is thank god for the Staff Recommended Reading shelf! The bright, slightly creepy, cover is what caught my attention and the first couple pages held it so tight my friend had to punch me to get it back. The verse structure put me off in the beginning and took a little getting used to, but the book did not. An unbelievably intricate plotline keeps you on your toes and the perpetual twists weave a thousand seemingly random threads into a story so intense you'll groan out loud every time you have to put it down, if you can that is. The constantly switching character point of view gives you a look into every piece of the massive puzzle that is werewolves living in the suburbs and throws emotion after emotion onto every single page with incredible flow. A must read for fiction fans. Be warned, all other books after this might just not satisfy you.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 16, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Refreshing and Unique

    In stylized free verse, the book relates a completely unique tale of L.A. werewolf packs in a contemporary setting. The free verse marks one character's story from another's through formatting breaks in the text. It took me six pages to get the hang of it and about the first twenty-five to sort out most of the primary characters/story lines. There's love, gut chomping violence, drugs, crime, loyalty and betrayal. It's the perfect package.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 22, 2008

    One of my favorite books!

    At first I wasn't sure I'd really get into a book written in verse, but after the first few pages I realized it would be perfectly easy to overlook that. Sharp Teeth is violent, touching, action packed, and still beautiful. This is an amazing book -with a surprisingly sweet love story- that I recommend to anyone. And just because you're a teenager doesn't let you off the hook. I'm sixteen and, like it says on my heading, this is one of my favorite books! 8)

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 20, 2008

    Refreshing!

    This book has a very refreshing and unique style. It is written in kindof verse that almost reminds one of an oral legend. I was put off by the format at first but after the first few pages I was hooked! Very quick and easy read and the action and dialogue are taunt and concise. Very highly recommended.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 8, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Good, but not great.

    On an excursion to BookPeople one day, my friend randomly picked this book out for me to read over the Christmas holidays. I was skeptical at first -- it's about werewolves, and I'm more of a vampire/witch/ghost kind of girl -- but I agreed to give it a chance. To my surprise, I was quickly sucked in by all of the different plot lines that eventually came together to solve the story's overlying mystery. I also really liked getting to know the well-devoloped characters, specifically Lark, Anthony, and the main she-wolf (who is never named). However, I wasn't a big fan of the free verse style that Toby Barlow used in the writing of Sharp Teeth. I usually like poetic writing styles, but in this particular novel, it distracted from the story and made some things somewhat difficult to understand. Nor did I enjoy the ending as much as I would have liked; I felt that it was rushed and anti-climactic, especially after the slow build of events that seemed to prepare the reader for an epic conclusion (which did not happen). Regardless, this is definitely not a bad book to read for fun. (Unless, of course, you can't stand anything with a bit of blood and gore. These werewolves are not vegetarians.)

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  • Posted August 20, 2010

    Good Book

    This was a good book, with an interesting writing style. At first I thought it would be distracting, but as I got into the story line it really pulled me in.

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  • Posted March 27, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Edgy, lyrical

    It was the cover of this book that first caught my eye---all that red with the bold black silhouette and knobby font. "Sharp Teeth?" I thought. "How and why and what is that about?" And then I opened it up, and reviews jumped out at me from the end papers---reviews that, more than anything else, made me want to read it. And because I'm glad I did---and because anyone reading this online review is unlikely to be able to see those stirring reviews in the end papers---I thought I'd try my hand at something similar. So: "Gritty, swift, threaded in loyalty and love, power and betrayal, this verse novel sings a noir tale of modern werewolf life. Run with Lark and his pack as they battle for survival amid packs of rival lycanthropes, L.A.'s dogcatchers, and the divergent desires of their own hearts."

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  • Posted February 11, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Dark, Raw, and Undeniably Cool Book

    When I first picked this book up and began flipping through the pages I could not put it down. The style in which it is written is wonderful: a poetic style that is dark and dramatic and devastatingly cool. It reads, stylistically speaking, like a noir comic book, or the literary equivalent of the movie Sin City. Barlow has brought the fantasy concept of werewolves into the everyday, mundane world, and tells a thrilling, captivating story that hits you and lingers like a warm shot of bourbon. Highly recommended for a fun, cool read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 26, 2010

    Book Review for "Sharp Teeth"

    The name of my book is Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. Some of the main characters in this book include, Lark;the leader of the main pack in this story. Anthony Silbo;a poor, lonely, Latino dogcatcher. The she wolf;her name is unknown, she leaves her pack, and potentially falls in love with Anthony.Bone; basically the she wolves sister, but is just one of the pack. The basic conflict in this book is between the she wolf and her ex-pack, she's having trouble leaving because some of the pack won't let her leave. The leader of the pack, Lark, has sent some of his men to go and investigate the other packs in the surrounding area. One of the other packs finds out they are being infiltrated because a member of Lark's pack, Baron, sold them out. While Lark is gone one night, his pack is out numbered and attacked by the other pack.

    This book was a sort of a let down because of the way it was written and the order of the events that occurred. The book is not written in normal paragraph form, its written as if the book was made of poetry and is really choppy. The long drag between the exciting parts of the story and just the fillers are long and didn't hold my attention. What I did like about this book is what its about. Werewolves living in a society like today in the same century that we live in today, and I just just flat out like fantasy. Although the book may be interesting at times I would not recommended this for other people to read, unless you have a very good attention span.

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  • Posted October 5, 2009

    Very Disappointed

    Can I give it less than one star? Thought it sounded like an interesting read. Completely unreadable. Although I knew that it was not written in the standard "paragraph" format, I never thought it would be so choppy and disjointed. The story falls flat. I have never given up on a book... but this one? Could not even bear to read it. Very sorry I purchased this book.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 8, 2009

    Smart and Unusual.

    You will not find too many other books like this. A werewolf book, set in Los Angeles, and written entirely in free verse. It took only three or four pages to get accustomed to this style of writing, and the story is fast paced, if a little difficult to keep track of. The characters in the story shapeshift into dogs instead of actual werewolves, but there is plenty of action and an extremely original storyline.

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  • Posted May 6, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    W O W ! ! and Wow again!

    Excellent characters who engage you and make you care on an emotional level. A plotline that will make you want to race to the end. And a free style writing prose that is mesmerizing (not gimicky, don't listen to mr. stuffed shirt writer dude). This is one of the few books I have (had) that gets passed around in a whirlwind between family and friends, so much so that I have bought a second copy to stow away on my bookshelf. Would make a fantastic movie if they could get the action/transformations right and still remember the deep human elements.

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  • Posted April 20, 2009

    I loved this book

    It took me a little while to get used to the format, but once I did it proved to be an incredibly enjoyable tale. Just a great story.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 23, 2009

    Stick with it

    I had seen this book online before and thought that it sounded pretty good, so I picked it up while at Barnes & Noble one day. Since I already knew what the book was about I didn't bother opening up the book at all. I brought the book home and found that it was written in free verse. I hadn't read a book like this before and was a little angry that I had bought a book like that. But I thought that I was being a little closed minded about it and decided to give it a try. The free verse is unusually hard to read, my eyes kept scanning til the end of the page even though it was blank. It's like reading a 300 page poem, you wouldn't want to read a poem that long would you? As a writer myself, I found it confusing to see that a writer would choose to make his debut novel free verse. I also felt that it was a gimmick to sell the book to critics and readers, and judging by the other reviewers it seems to be working so well done Mr. Barlow. It seemed like it could have been a very good book had not been written in free verse. I also think that critics and the other reviewers fell in love with the idea of a free verse novel, because the plotline and characters are only fairly good not great.

    But I decided to rate this book on the overall plotline of the book. The book definetely has it's moments where you can't get enough of the book. The problem was that it didn't happen to me until 170 pages into the book, and by then I had almost written off the book because of the free verse style. I couldn't help but feel it could have been better if the writer had decided to make a bigger effort with his debut novel. Sure, I know it probably wasn't an easy book to write, but it would have been a very good BOOK. I feel that I cant quite recommend this to everyone. It has a fairly good plotline but the free verse is not for everyone. What I would recommend doing is picking up this book and reading the first couple chapters (they are quite short) and see what you think.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 22, 2008

    I struggled with the rating.

    It's safe to say that I liked this book and thought the style was engaging and different - but then again I think the style worked against the book as well. I found that I couldn't keep the characters straight and even once I had, it was difficult for me to understand the separate sides to the story and how they all related to one another. Seeing as though there were others who absolutely loved it, maybe it would be wise to read through it again and catch things that were missed the first time. Ultimately I can't decide if I would ever recommend this book, but I did so on here anyway since it would be good to hear other opinions on it.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 24, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 15, 2010

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 8, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 22, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

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