The verse is pitched somewhere between rock lyrics, a poetry slam, and Longfellow; mainly, it lends the book a punchy, addictive momentum that matches its plot, and it gives Barlow an excuse to show off his talent for crisp, imaginative metaphors: The scene of a double murder looks like “a Jackson Pollock valentine,” and “Anthony in love is unlikely/in its grace,/like a drunk with a magic trick.”

BACKSTORY
For centuries, children have fallen asleep to tales of big bad wolves mystifying (at best) their ancestors. Shape-shifting beasts prowled the pages of pulp magazines, and in 1933, American novelist Guy Endore wrote the Dracula of the genre, The Werewolf of Paris. The first werewolf film, Werewolf of London, came two years later, followed by The Wolf Man, in 1941, which cemented the werewolf’s place in cinema history. An American Werewolf in London hit theaters decades later, in 1981. More recently, J. K. Rowling introduced a more sympathetic werewolf, Remus Lupin, loyal friend to Harry Potter.

Regardless of its line breaks, Sharp Teeth is essentially a tightly written crime thriller. The machinations of its plot, aside from the lapping up of blood, are all familiar Sopranos-style topoi: Who works for whom? What are they planning? And who’s spying on them? The novel builds briskly via gunplay, arson, murder, eviscerations, and broken hearts. Anthony falls in love with a she-wolf (every pack, disturbingly, has only one) who’s desperate to escape her murderous past; a once-peaceful pack of surfer werewolves is forced into vigilantism by societal abuse; an alpha white-collar criminal mastermind werewolf gets ousted in a coup, only to find himself adopted (in a kind of ad hoc witness-protection program) as a house pet named Buddy; and a rogue cop gets sucked by a stray lead into this “muddle of riddles.” It’s all nicely paced and smartly embroidered—until the very end, when the plots and counterplots converge in a climactic battle for the soul of Los Angeles, and (although I hesitate to call anything in a werewolf novel “implausible”) the book soars to great heights of bonkers nuttiness. By the time the S-70 Blackhawk helicopter touches down in the middle of a “shrieking, killing symphony of noise,” the book feels like it has morphed prematurely into its own screenplay.

But this is just a quibble: Every dog, after all, has its dénouement. Overall, the book is a howling, hole-digging, bone-snapping, blood-lapping, intestine-gobbling success. To whimper over its misbehavior would be merely splitting hairs.

Sharp Teeth
By Toby Barlow.
Harper. 312 pages. $22.95.

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