I picked up The Lives of the Monster Dogs at the library one weekend strictly on its cover; a beautiful Siberian Husky/Malamute-type dog in a smoking jacket. The blurb on the back was intriguing; dogs that walk upright on their hind legs, have prosthetic-yet-working human hands and voice boxes, land in New York City.
You'd think they'd have all kinds of zany adventures; wrong-o! Turns out these are Monster Dogs, that's the name they accept for themselves, and they set up housekeeping in NYC. Of course, they're all still stuck in the 1800s (there's a long, semi-pointless back story that vaguely involves Kaiser Wilhelm that explains this) and are all wearing bustled dresses and Prussian uniforms, but that's okay because it's New York City and that's where the Freak Flag flies. At least, that's their rationale for landing in NYC.
Talking dogs, Victorian clothes, and laser guns (yes, laser guns). What could go wrong?
Oh, everything. For a first time novel, the prose isn't so bad. But author Kirsten Bakis could definitely use some help in that area. It's wooden, basic, cliche, and totally unsupportive of what she is trying to accomplish. How this book won so many awards escapes me.
The characters themselves are never fully developed, nor are they even caricatures of themselves. They are boring, flat, one-note creations that serve as speed bumps in the narrative.
There are at least two, and possibly three, distinct narratives in the book, including a plethora of plot details and holes that are either dropped, ignored, or simply go nowhere. There is one narrative (the strongest, in my opinion) in the diary entries of Augustus Rank, the creator of the monster dogs, presented in the second narrative, a history of the race of Monster Dogs presented by Ludwig, a dog historian. Then there is a third, the weakest narrative, of present-day NYC and the human journalist Cleo who is invited into the inner sanctum of the Monster Dogs.
Except not really. Despite that being her purpose, Cleo dwells many times on the fact that she's simply not invited to everything the dogs do, and maybe she was hired because she's an easily-controlled idiot. The author does not provide much to discredit that theory. We see her trusted by two, maybe three, of the Monster Dogs, and despite the fact there's supposedly 150 or so dogs, we meet maybe five.
Ludwig the Historian, Klaue the PR guy, Lydia the white-furred best friend, the bulldog who writes the opera libretto and... that's it. Aside from a few mentioned in passing, those are the main dogs we meet.
I can hand-wave away the book's main premise; an 1800s surgeon figuring out a way to alter a dog's brain to let it speak like a human and have human hands? I can suspend my disbelief for that. But there are a lot--let me repeat that, so you don't miss it--a lot of other plot holes in the novel. Including the fact that the female protagonist carries a laser gun in her boot in 2008. (The novel was written in 1997; not even ten years into the "future" and we all own laser guns! And yet this is never addressed, not even once!)
But what I can't forgive is everything else. The lack of character development, the lack of plot development, the hot mess that is the denouement of the entire novel, and the tacked-on Mega-Happy epilogue, which reminds the reader of both Wayne's World and it's "fished in!" mega-happy ending as well as the Harry Potter nad the Deathly Hallows future epilogue.
None of the dogs are explored in depth; Klaue is supposedly a mastermind of secrecy and manipulation, and yet, he is open with Cleo as much as a monster dog is with a human, and he invites her to meetings and gives her unfettered access to the dogs' society. But this is never explained, except by the other dogs (namely Lydia and Ludwig) saying that Klaue is "untrustworthy."
Ludwig is not developed at all past the cliche of "eccentric historian" and many of the things we discover through Ludwig's eyes are left untouched. But the worst of them all is the disease that is running rampant through the dogs. Other reviews have called Monster Dog Alzheimer's, and while that is vaguely accurate, it isn't. Ludwig at first seems to be the only dog suffering from it, but as the story goes along we find out that it is affecting nearly all the dogs, and their plans for a cure are...
Unbelievable. I'm an animal lover, and the thought of what they were doing to each other made me sick, and I nearly put the book down. But even this is treated with a carelessness that made me angry; while we don't get detailed paragraphs, we also don't get even a mention, other than the occasional echo of the sound through the castle. (Yes, there's a castle. I just didn't bother mentioning it because shockingly, the author doesn't either. Just one day, the dogs are all, "Hey, we're gonna blow up a city block and build a big-ass replica of the Sleeping Beauty castle, k?" And shockingly, NYC is okay with that.)
If you want to read about mutated animals or smart dogs, pick up The Island of Dr. Moreau or Dean Koontz' Watchers. Both are much better and much more enjoyable reads.
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