The Opposite of Twilight

I can neither explain why nor actually how much I loved this book, but I do know it was my first experience as a reader in a long time where I had to fight to put it down...where I stayed up later than I wanted to or woke up early to keep reading (though I did read it all in 36 hours, so that may be a bit hyperbolic). While I don't love it the same (or even as much, necessarily) as a David Mitchell or Murakami, it is an entirely different beast (first of many intended puns) and can share shelf space with them in my heart-library any day.

In a nutshell, this book is a noir, set in Los Angeles, that is about werewolves and written in blank verse. Go ahead and read that sentence again. A werewolf-noir-epic poem. These werewolves are neither mopy nor gargantuan and beastly (so they are neither of the Twilight nor Gothic/Victorian variety). They are lycanthropes in the mythological sense, men who can turn into beasts at will. The beasts are closer to dogs, usually, than wolves, though they are huge, vicious, and above all, sentient and intelligent dogs. They can rip a man to shreds, or they can plot huge schemes while you scratch their ears in your home. It's also a love story about a dogcatcher and a female lycanthrope, known only as "She" (and their love is of the human-human variety, not the human-female dog variety), who is the lone female for the pack the story begins by following (apparently Barlow's inspiration was in part an article about a dogcatcher in the Chicago Reader that revealed that packs of wild dogs usually are comprised of many males and one female).

Barlow immerses you into a world that is similar but not like your own, a world of drug dealers and dog fighters and surfers, and a world where packs of man/dogs are organized like gangs or like country clubs or like hedge fund firms. Where some are ruled by sex and some by love and some by a zen like philosophy of abstention. Where revenge comes to many but where innocents are felled as well, and some are left behind to mourn. His writing (and remember its in blank verse) can follow many perspectives at once, can be in turns brutal and charged, and beautiful and sad, and funny and true. I don't know if everyone will react like I did (in reviews it seems most reviewers think this book will be clasped to the bosoms of generations of teenage goths and outsiders, an idea that made me more than a little suspicious) but I think its worth it to try. It is, after all, about fucking werewolves.