At some point during the reading of Sharp Teeth you’re going to wake up with a sense of wonder, and not because you’ve suddenly realized that you’re reading a novel about werewolves in Los Angeles and it’s written in blank verse. No, it will be because you’ve suddenly realized that you’re reading a novel about werewolves in Los Angeles, it’s written in blank verse, and you’re really enjoying it. What the hell!

I tried to resist Toby Barlow’s debut—I really did. And my inner Calvinist is still telling me that something this much fun can’t be entirely good for you. I have an abiding sense that Barlow, who’s billed as the executive creative director of a Detroit-based advertising agency, has written this book with an eye to a future Hollywood adaptation. He gives us a square-jawed, steely-eyed antihero; a sensitive, handsome Hispanic romantic lead; a trendy, if never fully explored, First Nations connection; and, of course, the obligatory blond. The overall feel is Fight Club meets Warren Zevon; Quentin Tarantino would be all over it, were he to direct.

It’s true, also, that setting
Sharp Teeth in blank verse
lends unearned weight
to a wigged-out exercise
in genre fiction.

But even if you’re as suspicious a reader as I am, Barlow’s brisk, bloody story will reel you in. It’s pulp, for sure, but pulp with a mythic dimension, as if Raymond Chandler had written Beowulf. Real-life Los Angeles is just weird enough that, yeah, werewolves might be prowling its streets, and if they were they’d probably masquerade as casting agents or lawyers or, as here, cardsharps, surfers, and “businessmen” whose business interests are never fully disclosed.

Bizarre though it is, Sharp Teeth has the ring of truth—yet it’s a story about humans turning into killer canines. Find a way to make that cognitive leap, which might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, and you’ll be well rewarded.