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Toby Barlow: Bite on this

13.07.07 Benedicte Page

A novel in verse about violent turf warfare between rival gangs of werewolves on the streets of modern Los Angeles doesn't come along every day. Toby Barlow's début offering Sharp Teeth (Wm Heinemann, August) is an original; thankfully it avoids self-conscious gimickry despite its unusual elements—which include echoes of both the X-Men comics and classical epic—to pull off a pacy, visceral narrative that tells its tale of love, loyalty and betrayal with considerable conviction and ease.

Barlow penned the piece in a series of anonymous hotels in which he was staying while working on his day job as an advertising executive. He has no past record as a poet, but the verse form, he says, came naturally to the story from the start.

"The style surprised me as much as it has surprised other people," he explains over the telephone from the US. "It's boiled down pulp fiction, almost—instead of thinking about it as poetry or verse, I'm thinking about it as stripping a story down to its tightest bits. I really like the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and I find myself at a point not even absorbing the artwork, but finding these terse bits of story that they string together to make up a narrative, so that it becomes just a very tightly told tale. I like to think of Sharp Teeth as a ripping yarn with all the unnecessary words ripped out."

He quotes, as a preface to the book, the Robert Frost line: "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."

The story, told from various perspectives, is of an LA dog-catcher, Anthony, who unbeknown to himself is presiding over a hidden world where packs of rival lycanthropes are involved in a bitter power struggle. Lark is the leader of one pack, together with his consort, the single female of the group—but then his pack subordinate Baron springs a deadly attack and pulls off a coup, which leaves many dead and the rest forced to bow to Baron's leadership. Alone and nursing his wrongs, Lark plots his revenge. Meanwhile, Anthony finds himself getting closer and closer to the violent werewolf world.

"I started with the dog-catcher theme," Barlow explains. "I was reading an article about a dog-catcher in Chicago in which he was describing his daily labours, and he mentioned that packs of dogs rotated around one single female. That was a surprising fact that I didn't know, and although I'm not a horror genre buff by any means, for some reason I thought: 'If those were werewolves, and the female fell in love with the dogcatcher, that would be an interesting central dynamic.'

"It was fun to try to play the high and the low at the same time, to have classical themes intertwining with bits of pop culture. I was a classics major, and one of my favourite moments in college was when my friends introduced me to a trunk-load of comic books—I stayed there all weekend, and I think the two things created a mélange that kept stirring together. I think a lot of people think of Homer's Iliad as being this intimidating, great book, when it is sort of just a comic book on violence in some ways. You can imagine the young schoolboys who've had to translate their ancient Greek were just thrilled, reading all those battle scenes with lances cutting into legs and so on."

There's no doubting that werewolves are currently a popular theme. Barlow waxes philosophical: "I think when we had the '70s, and it was this crazy, decadent era, we had Frank Langella's 'Dracula' and a lot of vampires. In tougher times, that's when the werewolf stories come out. It seems to be part of our collective unconscious. When war is happening, when resources are dwindling, you start thinking: 'Who is my pack? Who can I rely on when things get more savage?' "

Authors Todays Picks Benedicte Page Toby Barlow

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