Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

Like most exhilarating works of copious bloodshed, Toby Barlow's debut novel, Sharp Teeth, begins on a quiet note: with a solitary, mild-mannered figure named Anthony Silvo, flipping through want ads at his East L.A. breakfast table. After several fruitless phone calls, he happens upon a position with the city's animal-control department, which triggers the memory of a puppy he received as a child from a bullishly built but warm-hearted father. It is the only clue we are given to Anthony's background or the roots of his melancholic resignation. A week after the puppy's arrival, he recalls, his father went through a windshield on Sepulveda, his mother became a widow, and the puppy was returned to the pound.

David Wild

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(Click to enlarge)

"And after that," Barlowwrites, "nothing was kind." This is not, indeed, a gentle world. The city, for one thing, is teeming with werewolves. They come into focus gradually as the scope of the book expands: a pack in Silver Lake, one in Long Beach, one in San Pedro. Feuds are igniting between rivals; hierarchies are falling to violent coups d'etat; onetime dog traffickers are winding up dead or maimed, and the only cop who cares is little match for the surfer-chick pack leader who's taken to stringing him along. One pack has infiltrated the city's shelter system; another, for convoluted reasons, the Pasadena bridge club. Throw in a heavyweight Mexican meth manufacturer named Goyo, out to avenge the death of his brother, an unsavory band of pound co-workers, and a love