Dog by Bruce McAllister
My rating: 4/5 cats
“That’s what you get when you mix the blood-sacrifice Aztecs with the Catholic emphasis on suffering.”
a deliciously creepy tor short, with a whizz-bang of an ending that’ll have you all fist-pumping and oorahing no matter how you feel about dogs.
me, i love dogs. i mean, wookit:
but some dogs are very very bad.
nope, worse than that.
yeah, more like that.
david and jennifer are newly-wedded and deeply in love, with plans and dreams and full of the liberal fervor of youth. they get teaching positions down mexico way, but david dismisses the good advice he is given by a wise friend: Don’t be stupid. Find out what you need to know about a country . . . so you don’t die like an idiot, a decision he will come to regret:
We did not yet know that to romanticize a country, to sentimentalize its people and places and the creatures of it, not only is an affront to them—to the struggle between darkness and light which gives any human beings their meaning on this earth—but can end very badly.
and things will end very badly, indeed.
and it will involve dogs. very bad dogs.
yeah, just like that, you sweet innocent thing.
it’s a ferocious little story, and it reinforced my decision to never travel anywhere ever. i may still die like an idiot, but i will die like an idiot in my own house, on my own terms.
the rest of you, look out!
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2015/03/do…
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