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4.33 AVERAGE
4.33 AVERAGE
Culann has gotten himself into a little bit of trouble, and as many have done before him, he absconds to the rugged life found in Alaska to avoid prosecution. His cousin Frank has fixed him up with a job on a fishing trawler, and a couch to sleep on. On his first trip out, he learns the captain has a habit of fishing the same area year after year, never branching out to seek out larger yields of fish. Then the crew hauls in a strange object, and everything just gets weirder from there.
Having spent his last few years as a school teacher, Culann is worked harder than ever before as a deckhand, and takes some abuse as a greenhorn who needs to prove himself.
I really enjoyed the first half of this relatively short story (I think the e-book that I received was only about 118 pages). However once Culann came back to port and everything started getting really weird, I started to find it less enjoyable. I mean, fantastical plotline aside, it just got too unrealistic for me. People were too quick to just accept the what Culann said at face value and resign themselves to their doom. ("Oh well. I'm going to mysteriously drop dead in the upcoming hours, because this criminal on the run says so. Guess I'll just resign myself to it and get drunk.")
And then when Culann in the end begins to reflect on his crime and almost seems to justify his actions. In the beginning I liked him, but by the end I was pretty much over him and finding him a little repulsive.
One thing of note is that the font in my ARC made reading very difficult. I hope that this may be improved in the printed copy, but the font was eratic, varying from small to large to bold. It was supposed to have been done to indicate the state the writer was in, as it is a diary of what's happened to him in the previous days and weeks.
Also, sometimes the "i" looked like an "l" (causing "Alistair" to look like "Allstar"), and "f" looked like "r". Very confusing.
My final word: While I wound up not being enamored by Culann or the story in general in the end (as I was in the beginning), it was still a "good" story, and exhibited some solid writing. I would recommend it if you are looking for a fast escape.
Having spent his last few years as a school teacher, Culann is worked harder than ever before as a deckhand, and takes some abuse as a greenhorn who needs to prove himself.
I really enjoyed the first half of this relatively short story (I think the e-book that I received was only about 118 pages). However once Culann came back to port and everything started getting really weird, I started to find it less enjoyable. I mean, fantastical plotline aside, it just got too unrealistic for me. People were too quick to just accept the what Culann said at face value and resign themselves to their doom. ("Oh well. I'm going to mysteriously drop dead in the upcoming hours, because this criminal on the run says so. Guess I'll just resign myself to it and get drunk.")
And then when Culann in the end begins to reflect on his crime and almost seems to justify his actions. In the beginning I liked him, but by the end I was pretty much over him and finding him a little repulsive.
One thing of note is that the font in my ARC made reading very difficult. I hope that this may be improved in the printed copy, but the font was eratic, varying from small to large to bold. It was supposed to have been done to indicate the state the writer was in, as it is a diary of what's happened to him in the previous days and weeks.
Also, sometimes the "i" looked like an "l" (causing "Alistair" to look like "Allstar"), and "f" looked like "r". Very confusing.
My final word: While I wound up not being enamored by Culann or the story in general in the end (as I was in the beginning), it was still a "good" story, and exhibited some solid writing. I would recommend it if you are looking for a fast escape.
DoG is one of those books that you really enjoy but desperately hope no-one asks you ‘What’s it about?’ because you can’t answer.
I didn’t have the blindest idea what was going on for a good half of the book, I knew the characters names, where they came from and what they wanted but where the story was going and why? Not a clue.
Despite that it was compulsive reading, I raced through it and really enjoyed it. I wanted to know what was going to happen and I wanted to know what was going on.
The main character, I hesitate to call him a hero, Culann is on the run from the police. A former English teacher who had sucumbed to his thirst for alcohol and given in to impulses pertaining a sixteen year old girl in his class, he was far from lovable but he was very human and normal. He felt guilt, self-disgust, fear and hope. His flight to a tiny island off the Alaskan coast is filled with the hope that he will find some sort of redemption and a cure for his ‘urges’.
Indeed, his work on a brutal fishing boat seems a fitting punishment, but when he accidentlly fishes a mysterious orb out of the sea everything goes a little bit freaky.
The Captain of the boat turns out to be completely mad and everyone on the island succumbs to a mysterious virus, leaving Culann to endure an even greater retribution than the fishing boat, accompanied only by the pack of dogs inhabiting the island.
A clever tale of punishment and reform with a satisfying ending, DoG has a touch of fantasy and a heavy dose of humanity. Very different from everything I have read before it was a curious look at the way people view the world and the journeys we take ourselves on in the name of morals.
I didn’t have the blindest idea what was going on for a good half of the book, I knew the characters names, where they came from and what they wanted but where the story was going and why? Not a clue.
Despite that it was compulsive reading, I raced through it and really enjoyed it. I wanted to know what was going to happen and I wanted to know what was going on.
The main character, I hesitate to call him a hero, Culann is on the run from the police. A former English teacher who had sucumbed to his thirst for alcohol and given in to impulses pertaining a sixteen year old girl in his class, he was far from lovable but he was very human and normal. He felt guilt, self-disgust, fear and hope. His flight to a tiny island off the Alaskan coast is filled with the hope that he will find some sort of redemption and a cure for his ‘urges’.
Indeed, his work on a brutal fishing boat seems a fitting punishment, but when he accidentlly fishes a mysterious orb out of the sea everything goes a little bit freaky.
The Captain of the boat turns out to be completely mad and everyone on the island succumbs to a mysterious virus, leaving Culann to endure an even greater retribution than the fishing boat, accompanied only by the pack of dogs inhabiting the island.
A clever tale of punishment and reform with a satisfying ending, DoG has a touch of fantasy and a heavy dose of humanity. Very different from everything I have read before it was a curious look at the way people view the world and the journeys we take ourselves on in the name of morals.
Wow. What a great book! I'm going to smack you now for wasting time reading this review instead of sticking your nose hard into this book like it was the shaved cooter of the hottest chick in high school. What? You like your cooters with a little hair on them? Cool, have your hairy cooter, see if I care. Who am I to judge a with a thing for wookie bush? What were you brought up in the 70s? Freak. Read this book freak.
Also, now that I've guilted you into some personal landscaping you're going to need something to read. Let's face facts, your love for crotch jungles is really going to take you quite awhile to clean up. My advice would be to grab a copy of Matt Hlinak's DOG because it's fucking boss. Now I'm not saying only people in desperate need of a thorough lap shave will enjoy this book (though they will), what I'm saying is the book is bad ass, five speed, four-to-the-floor, chrome plated awesome. And it's got a 326 under the hood! (Is that good? I don't know cars so if you do make all those specs sound like really fucking good, because that's what Matt Hlinak's book is, fucking good!)
There, now you're shaved and feeling spry You've read Matt Hlinak's DOG and you are better for it. You're part of a club. You are a bigger piece of the whole. You are DOG GOD!
Read More Rooster Republic Press now because those guys sport this caliber all damned day long!
Also, now that I've guilted you into some personal landscaping you're going to need something to read. Let's face facts, your love for crotch jungles is really going to take you quite awhile to clean up. My advice would be to grab a copy of Matt Hlinak's DOG because it's fucking boss. Now I'm not saying only people in desperate need of a thorough lap shave will enjoy this book (though they will), what I'm saying is the book is bad ass, five speed, four-to-the-floor, chrome plated awesome. And it's got a 326 under the hood! (Is that good? I don't know cars so if you do make all those specs sound like really fucking good, because that's what Matt Hlinak's book is, fucking good!)
There, now you're shaved and feeling spry You've read Matt Hlinak's DOG and you are better for it. You're part of a club. You are a bigger piece of the whole. You are DOG GOD!
Read More Rooster Republic Press now because those guys sport this caliber all damned day long!
Matt Hlinak, DoG (Bizarro Press, 2013)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Netgalley.
Matt Hlinak's DoG is published by Bizarro Press, which, if you're familiar with the wild and wonderful word of bizarro fiction, may impart to you some preconceived notions about what you're getting here. I will rush to tell you that all of those notions are wrong, pretty much. DoG feels like a straight drama to me for most of its length, despite some magical-realist elements, and doesn't really dive into the realm of the weird until its final few pages. While I love bizarro, I don't think this is a bad thing—Hlinak took some very difficult themes, played them straight, and for the most part came up with a winner.
The protagonist of DoG is one Culann Riordan, a former schoolteacher who has dropped out of sight after a misunderstanding with a student in his native Illinois. He has a hard-drinking cousin who works on a fishing trawler in Alaska, and as we open, Culann is disembarking (dear cruise ship industry: “debarking” is something you do to a dog, if you're cruel) at the ass end of the world, ready to join his cousin in a new career of hauling fish and tossing shots. He soon finds that this particular ass end of the world is full of folks who are running from things, just like he is, from draft dodging to murder. Not that that makes him feel any more at home, but it's something. When it comes time to board the ship, it's all about fish, nets, and alcohol for a while, but Culann eventually finds out that the boat's mysterious captain, rarely seen and never heard, has an ulterior motive in his meanderings that has little to do with fish...and the Culann and his cousin may be inadvertently influencing.
None of which has a blessed thing to do with dogs. You get to that part later; the first almost three-quarters of the book is setup, and it puts one far more in mind of historical fiction than bizarro (the obvious parallel here is to Moby-Dick, but if you listen hard enough while Culann is describing the town and its inhabitants, there are echoes of D. J. Taylor's Derby Day, the bits of it that take place in the French harbor town). This is not a bad thing. Hlinak has a good feel for the pace of the story, and his sundry characters, even the minor ones, are competently-drawn and generally amusing, at least when they're not causing our protagonist to come within inches of losing some fingers. But just when you start thinking this is yet another book about an outcast who has to adjust to a new society, Hlinak pulls out a couple of subplots that seemed at the beginning as if they were going to be set decoration more than anything else and slaps you upside the head with them. Here is where the book's brevity (146pp.) does not do it service; each of those subplots could have easily taken up a novel of its own, as well as that whole “adjusting to a new society” gig (which never goes away, but necessarily changes direction about two-thirds of the way through the book), which could as well, and in many cases has. They synergize very well, and given that, this book could have easily been five or six times its present length and would probably still have not gotten to the depths of some of the ideas Hlinak flirted with here. In other words, I wanted more. And yes, that is a much better problem to have than “for the love of alsatians this thing went on way too long”, but if Hlinak ever decides to release a revised and expanded five-hundred-page edition of this book, I'll be first in line to grab it. What is here, however, is very enjoyable and makes me look forward to whatever Hlinak offers up next. *** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Netgalley.
Matt Hlinak's DoG is published by Bizarro Press, which, if you're familiar with the wild and wonderful word of bizarro fiction, may impart to you some preconceived notions about what you're getting here. I will rush to tell you that all of those notions are wrong, pretty much. DoG feels like a straight drama to me for most of its length, despite some magical-realist elements, and doesn't really dive into the realm of the weird until its final few pages. While I love bizarro, I don't think this is a bad thing—Hlinak took some very difficult themes, played them straight, and for the most part came up with a winner.
The protagonist of DoG is one Culann Riordan, a former schoolteacher who has dropped out of sight after a misunderstanding with a student in his native Illinois. He has a hard-drinking cousin who works on a fishing trawler in Alaska, and as we open, Culann is disembarking (dear cruise ship industry: “debarking” is something you do to a dog, if you're cruel) at the ass end of the world, ready to join his cousin in a new career of hauling fish and tossing shots. He soon finds that this particular ass end of the world is full of folks who are running from things, just like he is, from draft dodging to murder. Not that that makes him feel any more at home, but it's something. When it comes time to board the ship, it's all about fish, nets, and alcohol for a while, but Culann eventually finds out that the boat's mysterious captain, rarely seen and never heard, has an ulterior motive in his meanderings that has little to do with fish...and the Culann and his cousin may be inadvertently influencing.
None of which has a blessed thing to do with dogs. You get to that part later; the first almost three-quarters of the book is setup, and it puts one far more in mind of historical fiction than bizarro (the obvious parallel here is to Moby-Dick, but if you listen hard enough while Culann is describing the town and its inhabitants, there are echoes of D. J. Taylor's Derby Day, the bits of it that take place in the French harbor town). This is not a bad thing. Hlinak has a good feel for the pace of the story, and his sundry characters, even the minor ones, are competently-drawn and generally amusing, at least when they're not causing our protagonist to come within inches of losing some fingers. But just when you start thinking this is yet another book about an outcast who has to adjust to a new society, Hlinak pulls out a couple of subplots that seemed at the beginning as if they were going to be set decoration more than anything else and slaps you upside the head with them. Here is where the book's brevity (146pp.) does not do it service; each of those subplots could have easily taken up a novel of its own, as well as that whole “adjusting to a new society” gig (which never goes away, but necessarily changes direction about two-thirds of the way through the book), which could as well, and in many cases has. They synergize very well, and given that, this book could have easily been five or six times its present length and would probably still have not gotten to the depths of some of the ideas Hlinak flirted with here. In other words, I wanted more. And yes, that is a much better problem to have than “for the love of alsatians this thing went on way too long”, but if Hlinak ever decides to release a revised and expanded five-hundred-page edition of this book, I'll be first in line to grab it. What is here, however, is very enjoyable and makes me look forward to whatever Hlinak offers up next. *** ½