HOG WILD

In this comic action novel, a former sniper takes on a swarm of mutant hogs in rural Texas.

The feral hogs of South Texas are becoming a problem. “Two million brawling, fornicating, filthy beasts despoiling the best grazing land in the world,” as rancher Amanda Cross puts it. “Most intelligent mammal around. Smarter than a porpoise. In fact the ones that have been despoiling the Cross Bar Ranch seem to have become unusually smart.” That’s why Cross has hired Ray Puzo, a Special Forces sniper who has spent the last 17 years dealing death in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Hunting a few hogs sounds like an easy job to Ray, though the task quickly proves to be much more than he bargained for. For one thing, the Cross Bar Ranch is some 450 square miles in size. For another, Ray immediately embarrasses himself by getting beaten senseless by a vaquero outside the local watering hole. For a third, Cross’ 30-something daughter, Loretta, is an unstable, violent nymphomaniac who seduces Ray (mentioning that she’d love for him to kill her father). Oh, yeah, and then there’s the minor issue of the pigs themselves, who turn out to be a horde of superintelligent mutants who can speak and fire guns and go by punny pig names like Julius Caesar Pepperoniopolis and Reichsfuhrer Genghis of Cannes. The hogs have launched a holy war (“jihog”) against humankind, and their primary target is none other than the man they see as the greatest threat to their continued existence: Ray. Can Ray overcome his PTSD-induced sexual problems and defeat an army of anthropomorphized hogs?

Woods’ prose is a postmodernist mix of clever wording and libidinous humor, as here where he describes the tale’s primary setting: “Viewed from above, say from a Chinese spy satellite or perhaps one belonging to the Department of Homeland Security, the Cross Bar Ranch assumed the amphibian appearance of a giant pollywog. Or a lusty spermatozoon.” The book is gleefully violent and raunchy, and it doesn’t try to make its protagonist—an amoral man who isn’t afraid to drop a racial slur—palatable in the least. Ray is a type familiar enough from modern Westerns and crime novels, and he feels at home here in this genre mashup. Unfortunately, the story’s treatment of its female characters—most of whom throw themselves at Ray at one point or another—leaves much to be desired. The tone isn’t funny so much as it is absurdist. There are nods to Animal Farm, but the novel has no real political agenda per se, and its spiritual predecessors are less Orwell or Vonnegut than they are 1980s action movies. Readers looking for brainless fun of a certain he-man variety will find it here. But given Woods’ talent for turning a phrase or setting a scene, it’s disappointing that he did not set his ambitions a bit higher.

An amusing but garrulous bacchanalia of sex, guns, and talking pigs.