I went for this subtle looking affair. Not sure when or where I got it, but it's been on my TBR for a while.
I will start by saying it's a marked improvement on Slob. Robert Calder apparently knows how to string a few sentences together which is an instant win in comparison.
This is basically Jaws with a pack of dogs instead of a shark. Small town America, university lecturer finds an abandoned puppy in a service station and takes it home. A hundred miles away, An experimental lab breeding attack dogs realise they're missing a pup from a highly valued litter. Through some time bending narrative techniques, we find out how it found its way to the town of Covington.
A couple of years later, after an attack that strikes too close to home for Bauer, our central protagonist, the dog runs off into the mountains and joins a pack. From this point on, anyone who crosses their path is not safe.
I'm not going to say this is a work of art or brilliant in any capacity. It fills time in quite happily, but I'm guessing i won't remember much about this book in a few weeks time. the writing is ok for the most part, but the sex scenes are excruciating.
He also has an issue with his characters on the various sub plots never intersecting. if you want a character who's only purpose to the story is to die a horrible death, you should spend one chapter at most on them. Otherwise, you're leading the reader down an unsatisfying path. If a character appears in 4 separate chapters, he goddamn needs to contribute to the storyline more than just being ripped to shreds in his final appearance. He needs to interact with the other characters, not just wander about in his own little story entirely distanced from the everyone else before dying.
This is particularly true if you use this character for what, even in the 80s when this was written, would have been an intensely triggering sequence in the book for a lot of readers. See last paragraph for more detail on this. If you want to avoid spoilers, don't read the last paragraph.
Side note - i love the rats by James Herbert (and many other early Jmaes herbert books). I like to see shreddies in a book - characters who pop in for a chapter and die horribly. But they should only appear for the length of time it takes to get to know and like them. If they're not going to interact with your lead cast, don't give them too many pages. if they're only there to die in a set piece, get on with it and kill them.
There are threads left dangling which are fairly irritating. Bauer's marriage subplot is left hanging. the student he's unprofessionally friendly with just kind of fades out of the narrative. His other relationship plot is somewhat cringeworthy in every aspect (and that's not the one with the really bad sex scenes).
Overall this is a competently written little potboiler. You don't really feel sympathy for any of the characters or the dogs but it's entertaining enough that I wanted to get to the end.
a 4 or 5 out of 10. As the back cover says, this is more tightly written than Jaws. it is indeed a better book than Jaws. but that's not difficult.
Spoilers - This book does contain graphic descriptions of dogfighting, including an 9 page chapter describing a meeting, most of which is one fight in gruesome detail. I spotted the irony in the description of the death of the human character in that scene and the description of the injuries described in that chapter, but it still seems to be a character and scene inserted for no reason except to be edgy. That character could have been removed from the book except for his final two pages without impacting the plot in the slightest.
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