The Omega Dog by D.L. Snell, Thom Brannan
My rating: 3/5 cats
first of all, don’t let my three stars cats be a deterrent. the reason i didn’t love this book as much as i loved Pavlov’s Dogs is because of my own readerly shortcomings, and since i gave p.d. four stars cats, i had to give this one three stars cats, just because it did things that i personally find problematic in my horror fiction, but which most people are probably okay with. we will get into that.
it starts out great. the book opens at the very moment where we were abandoned in Pavlov’s Dogs, with all of its bloody repercussions. (i am being coy for those of you who have foolishly not read Pavlov’s Dogs yet) and then something awesome happens. awe. some. it is a complete game-changer, and i was fairly hooting with anticipation. it’s a really cool scene that opens up exciting possibilities.
and then the book changes and what?? where?? how?? which is fine—it splinters off into two stories which will eventually meet in the middle and it takes the reader far beyond the smaller-scale action of Pavlov’s Dogs, which was essentially just lab, compound, cage-fight, with some outdoor adventures.
this one goes way more free-range.
but then, and this is where i lost steam, a new supernatural element is introduced, on top of the zombies and werewolves. and for those of you who love the Lovecraft or the Laird Barron or the J.R. Hamantaschen or the ancient mayan mythology, this will probably totally knock your socks off. but reader-karen has always had difficulties with the incomprehensible kind of evil, which is probably why i prefer, overall, psychological horror novels to supernatural ones. i’ve said this all over the place—it is hard for me to picture shit in my head. so for me, it wasn’t as much fun as when it was just zombies-rarrr, werewolves a-ooooo.
but for you regular people, have at it!! after you read the first one, of course. this is good bloody fun for you and you can all thumb your noses at me while i sit and squint and try to figure out a magic eye puzzle.
hhhmph, my brain…
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