You’re in for a howling, jaw-licking, teeth-gnashing time with Toby Barlow’s debut novel, “Sharp Teeth.” What is it about werewolves that usually makes a book or movie scream cheesiness? Not so in this modernist-pumped, fast-paced, mythological, visual and innovative story. Barlow fills his pages with blank verse, a sort of Homer meets Kerouac meets Neil Gaiman. The biting prose works in the poetic form, and the snappy pace doesn’t undermine the seriousness of the work.
The novel is set in modern California and follows several packs of lycanthropes (aka werewolves) and the tenuous relationships among them. There’s your traditional evil no-gooder (Baron) who is bent on power and eager to betray the leader of his pack (Lark) while undermining another. There are the loyal dogs who wouldn’t twitch their snouts at the scent of any traitorous scheme. And there’s the star-crossed lovers—one man, one she-wolf—trying to maintain a healthy relationship despite an ungodly secret.

Anthony is a down and out dogcatcher, a gentleman who is good to the dogs he works with. His life quickly gets more exciting when he meets a charming and seductive woman at a bar—but he can’t even begin to imagine what’s under the surface. Their love is immediately a passionate one. Little does he know that she’s a werewolf from a pack that is about to fall completely apart because of one of its very own members.

Barlow captures the emotions of his characters in poetic moments of tasty word pairings. Describing the residual sadness of Anthony’s girlfriend (who remains unnamed throughout the book), he uses lyrical lines:

“Driving forward, looking back
She finds there is only the loosest bond
between time and pain
some things don’t pass,
the injuries don’t heal
they merely find a place in our guts
and in our bones
where they fitfully rest,
tossing and turning between our knuckles and our ribs
waiting to wake
as the shadows grow long.”

The story gets increasingly darker despite brief ecstatic moments between Anthony and his girl. Lark’s pack is forced apart by the traitorous Baron, and Lark has to seek shelter with a friendly woman who adopts him from the local shelter. Meanwhile, Baron works on a plan to place as many werewolves as possible in shelters and institute a no-kill policy so that they are adopted and placed in the homes of naïve nice families.

And there’s more. The story starts to twist and turn faster than a dog chasing its own tail. Other packs have their own motives for training their pups for the kill and recruiting new members. Two suspicious looking men infiltrate Lark’s pack and recruit a local police officer to get involved in the seedy and highly complex case.

There are moments of cold-blooded murder, as werewolves eat their prey down to the bone and lick the blood off the floor, leaving no trace of what they consumed. There are other moments of exhilarated love, as unsuspecting Anthony and his girlfriend find their own contented purpose with each other.

“Their love is eternal because time / seems to have fled, embarrassed / to be sharing such a small apartment / with so much dumb affection,” Barlow writes. There are also moments of pure noir suspense and mystery.

“Sharp Teeth” is a fun blend of pure gore and pure lust, whittled down to a minimalist form and written in a compelling manner. It’s one of the year’s most promising debuts, and a surprisingly doggone good read.