A review by verkisto
Dog Days O' Summer by James Newman, Mark Allan Gunnells

2.0

I'm not wild about werewolf stories, because they're usually all the same -- figure out who it is, and then figure out how to kill them. Dog Days o' Summer is no different in that respect, but it makes things laughably obvious when the narrator, who has a dog allergy, keeps sneezing whenever he's around his favorite teacher, who just returned from Romania. Had there been some sense of self-awareness to this setup, I might have been able to look at the story with a wry eye, but it comes across as totally serious, as if the authors are trying to be clever. It's just painful.

The novella is also a coming-of-age story, which might have been able to elevate the book beyond the usual werewolf tropes, but the authors are about as deft with the characters as they are with their werewolf hints. The characters aren't vivid, and while the story is compelling enough, there's not a whole lot to care about. My benchmarks for coming-of-age horror stories are Simmons' Summer of Night and King's It (and, of course, The Body, also by King (which reminds me, I should re-read McCammon's Boy's Life)), and Dog Days o' Summer simply doesn't compare. Maybe that's not fair to the authors here, but when you're wading into the waters that were borne from those books, you have to bring the big boats, not the arm floaties.

Musical Connection: "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence + the Machine