![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crockpotcauldronDOGFUCKERY ALERT
Fair warning.
So, here's the plot: a shallow party girl gets turned into a dog by an angry drunk homeless guy with uncontrollable magical powers. Her friends and family reject her as a mad dog despite her best efforts, and though the homeless guy feeds her in exchange for helping him panhandle, she ultimately finds a place with the other people who were cursed to become dogs, and decides life is better as a dog.
Here's how the book fell apart for me. First of all, the explicit first person dog sex scene. She narrowly avoids fucking a real dog, and winds up fucking both of her fellow cursed dog people.
Anyway, the second reason (as if I needed one) the book didn't work for me was that Burgess was trying to write the sort of character who could end the book happy to be a dog, and wound up with a protagonist who honestly sounds suicidally depressed, and I'm very concerned for her. She dreads the future, can't maintain stable relationships, and is constantly self-medicating with a haze of hedonism. Not only are those not doggy character traits, I feel like a happy ending would involve antidepressants, not her stated intent of forgetting her past, living fast, and dying young as a homeless dog. That's just suicide with a little dogfucking along the way. This is basically "and then Gregor Samsa decided being a giant bug was okay, mostly because being human was so monumentally shitty in the first place, and they all lived happily for a short time." You can't really cheer for that, you know? The book was a bizarre mix of existential horror, blithe hedonism, and comedy.
As far as werewolves go, I know she's a dog, but work with me here, the werewolf genre is very small and very bad. I could see this as part of the werewolf tradition of turning people you're mad at into wolves - St. Patrick and/or St. Natalis angrily turned hecklers into wolves in Ossory, it's been done at weddings as a punishment or revenge, and of course there's always Circe.
Fair warning.
So, here's the plot: a shallow party girl gets turned into a dog by an angry drunk homeless guy with uncontrollable magical powers. Her friends and family reject her as a mad dog despite her best efforts, and though the homeless guy feeds her in exchange for helping him panhandle, she ultimately finds a place with the other people who were cursed to become dogs, and decides life is better as a dog.
Here's how the book fell apart for me. First of all, the explicit first person dog sex scene. She narrowly avoids fucking a real dog, and winds up fucking both of her fellow cursed dog people.
Anyway, the second reason (as if I needed one) the book didn't work for me was that Burgess was trying to write the sort of character who could end the book happy to be a dog, and wound up with a protagonist who honestly sounds suicidally depressed, and I'm very concerned for her. She dreads the future, can't maintain stable relationships, and is constantly self-medicating with a haze of hedonism. Not only are those not doggy character traits, I feel like a happy ending would involve antidepressants, not her stated intent of forgetting her past, living fast, and dying young as a homeless dog. That's just suicide with a little dogfucking along the way. This is basically "and then Gregor Samsa decided being a giant bug was okay, mostly because being human was so monumentally shitty in the first place, and they all lived happily for a short time." You can't really cheer for that, you know? The book was a bizarre mix of existential horror, blithe hedonism, and comedy.
As far as werewolves go, I know she's a dog, but work with me here, the werewolf genre is very small and very bad. I could see this as part of the werewolf tradition of turning people you're mad at into wolves - St. Patrick and/or St. Natalis angrily turned hecklers into wolves in Ossory, it's been done at weddings as a punishment or revenge, and of course there's always Circe.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-11 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-11 01:27 pm (UTC)