DOGCHILD

The Call of the Wild meets Mad Max in this blood-soaked, nihilistic thriller.

Brooks’ latest follows a traumatized protagonist struggling to find the right words amid copious casualty and senseless causality. The apocalypse has come and gone; the surviving world consists of two enclaves—that of the enemy Dau and the town, a walled, seaside citadel—and a no man’s land populated by wild dogs. Born to teenage parents on a wagon trail, captured and raised by a dog pack, and rehumanized by his uncle, first-person narrator Jeet has always struggled to resolve his dogchild double consciousness: His is a canine soul in a human body. Gun Sur, the town’s authoritarian Marshal, charges Jeet with recording the entirety of known history prior to a pending battle. When Chola Se, another dogchild, is abducted, delivered to the Dau, and brutalized by Pilgrim (Gun Sur’s second-in-command) upon her return, the dogchildren must untangle the Gordian knot of her ordeal, sorting out multiple murders, double- and triple-crossings, and the inconceivable contours of the looming showdown. Racial signifiers are limited to skin tone; Jeet has brown skin, and many character names evoke a South Asian feel. Jeet’s unconventional prose, lacking quotation marks, eschewing apostrophes, and employing novel compound words such as “Ime” and “weare,” eventually wears smooth. Chola Se’s gang rapes followed by a questionable consensual sex scene feel like a plot device for inflating the stakes, troubling an otherwise egalitarian tale.

Uncompromisingly brutal and black hole–dense; howls to a niche audience.