Lives of the Monster Dogs (edit title/settings)

• Rated 2 stars

“The writing was unnaturally beautiful and poetic, but the story just couldn't hold my attention for very long. The snippets of the Dr. Frankenstein character - the man who created these monster dogs - enthralled me like nothing I've ever read before. I can't for the life of me put my finger on what I didn't like about this book. If has to be the main character Cleo that turned me off. She reminded me of the character of Jake in The Great Gatsby, I don't see where either of them fit into the stories they reside in, much less why they are the ones who take up so much of the dialogue. I think if Cleo - or Jake - weren't in the story, or weren't the narrators I would have given their stories a much longer span of my attention.
I am very disappointed about my feelings for this book. ”

• Rated 5 stars

“I first read this book when I was in that gray, everlastingly numb area after a breakup. The main character, Cleo Pira, was in the same place at the beginning of this novel, and Bakis's prose captured that lost feeling incredibly well.

I soon forgot about my own feelings as I was engrossed in the melancholy lives of the monster dogs, their magnificent and horrible creation and escape to modern-day (2008) New York City, and their attempt to make a life as creatures destined to be outsiders.

There is so much feeling in this book, much of it sad, but also accepting. There are twinges of sci-fi and medical horror - the descriptions of the creator of the monster dogs, Augustus Rank, his childhood and brilliantly single-minded and psychopathic devotion to his work, were perfectly chilling. I love stories about mad scientists and what comes of their mad work, and Bakis's novel fits in easily with Shelley's Frankenstein and Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Very original piece with a view to sociology and fiction. Leaves some questions unanswered but it works.”

• Rated 4 stars

“While I was reading Mr Chartwell I was reminded of another novel about dogs with human characteristics, The Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis. This book was originally published in 1998. It was a strong seller for us in it's day. Sadly, it is currently out of print but it is very much worth the effort of finding a copy at the library or a used bookstore.


The Lives of the Monster Dogs is about a community of dogs who become celebrities when they arrive in NYC in 2008 dressed to the nines 19th century style. They were the brainchild of Augustus Rank a mad Prussian scientist. In the late 1800's Rank established a secret town in the wilds of Canada. His own evil Brigadoon. There he set to work creating his Monster Dogs. Rank's plan was to create an independent yet completely loyal dog-soldier. He used his surgery skills to give them human hands and voice boxes and breed them to be super-intelligent. After Rank died his work was refined and completed by his disciples. At some point the dogs turned against their creators and they made their way to NYC.

The media is enchanted by these up scale refugees. They are the new big thing. They are courted by high society. It makes no difference whether anyone believes in the dogs or sees them as a hoax they still fascinate the public. They are elegant and sophisticated but they have a hard time adjusting to this new, modern world. Once in New York City they construct an amazing castle for themselves and then barricade themselves inside.

The narrator of the story is a young woman named Cleo Pira. She is one of the few, human friends the dogs have in their new homeland. Cleo is lonely and sees her own isolation mirrored in the dogs. She becomes the dog's press agent and liaison between them and the world, but she cannot protect them.

The Lives of the Monster Dogs was an engaging, stimulating science fiction novel about humanity, loneliness and celebrity culture. There are a few flaws there. The characterization of the dogs isn't as well defined as you would like and occasionally the dialog is a bit flat. However, Bakis puts her own voice to the Frankenstein story in an intriguing and inventive way. She is a strong storyteller and when book number two shows up I'll be very excited.
”

• Rated 2 stars

“Very interesting take on society.”

• Rated 2 stars

“really weird, defintitely a downer -- end of a society”

• Rated 5 stars

“(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

One of the sincerely biggest pleasures for me of being a book critic is to hear from the authors of the books I review, letting me know of the various ways they feel I got my analyses of their manuscripts right (and sometimes...er, [a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67531936"]not[/a]); so you can imagine my delighted surprise, then, when hearing out of the blue earlier this year from novelist Kirsten Bakis, thanking me for a long and detailed look I did back in the 1990s of her first and so far only book, the exquisite modern goth fever-dream tale Lives of the Monster Dogs, which turned out to be one of my favorite reads of that entire decade. But see, I'm embarrassed now of that write-up -- I did it long before opening CCLaP, back when I was a creative writer myself and only penned a handful of nonfiction pieces a year, and like many artists in their twenties in the 1990s I was going at the time through a bad David Foster Wallace, Insert Your Personal Life Too Much Into Your Critical Essays, And Make Sure To Include Lots Of Superfluous Postmodernist Footnotes phase, and while Bakis's lovely email inspired me to want to talk about her remarkable book again, I cringed every time I thought of dragging that old terrible '90s review I did back into public sunlight.

So I decided to do something a lot more sensible instead, which was simply read the novel again, for the fourth time total and the first time in years, and do a brand-new write-up based on how it struck me this time; and I have to say, I'm glad I did, because this almost perfect genre tale still holds up as the mindblowing industry changer it was greeted as when first coming out in 1997, and it was a real pleasure to get lost again in Bakis's deeply strange and proto-steampunk world. Because for those who don't know, the title is rather a literal one; the novel is in fact about a race of super-dogs that are created from the original work of a mad scientist from Victorian-Age Bavaria, only with his work never perfected until the early 2000s, long after his death. And so this makes the story a fussy Victorian fantastical tale and a modern urban fantasy at the same time, a look at what happens when this race of talking, intelligent, surgically enhanced oversized dogs actually move to New York and announce themselves to the world, while also being an epistolary look back at this mad scientist, one Augustus Rank, and all the steps in the late 1800s that led to him coming up with this idea in the first place.

Or, well, the book's actually a lot more than this as well, which is what got it so much attention in the first place, right in the same years that Donna Tartt's The Secret History was exploring the same general territory; written by an award-winning academic author during her years at the Iowa Writers Workshop (and indeed, this novel won several awards too, including the Stoker Award for Best First Novel, plus made the short list of that year's Orange Prize), Monster Dogs is also a look at the century Rank and his followers hid themselves away in a secret closed-off community in rural Canada, modeling themselves after the turn-of-the-century Prussian society they came from and then promptly cutting off contact with the outside world, which is why these dogs in the 2000s all speak in heavy High German accents and dress in tight-collared military uniforms and the like. And it's also about the terrible night that these successful test specimens, after years of growing into maturity, realize that it's time to overtake their former masters and violently slaughter all the humans in their hidden community, led by a Bible-quoting cur who claimed to be the reincarnated spirit of Rank himself. And it's also about the neo-classical opera that the dogs write in the 2000s to commemorate and explain this violent coup and the years of chaos that came afterwards, a 25-page libretto of which Bakis has faithfully recreated within the novel; and it's also about the elaborate Bavarian castle the dogs decide to build literally at the intersection of Houston and B on Manhattan's Lower East Side, paid for with the bundles of jewels that Rank and his followers slowly embezzled from Kaiser Wilhelm II a century previous, back when this entire project was under imperial supervision in the hopes of creating an army of unstoppable canine soldiers.

Whew, yeah, I know! And in another person's hands, such a ridiculously high level of fancifulness would fall apart very quickly; but that's the remarkable thing about Bakis, is that her natural talent plus years of honing this story makes it all tightly hold together no matter how ludicrous the details get, even when the last third dips into the legitimately disturbing (after the dogs come to realize that they are all slowly going insane, so decide to hold a month-long bacchanal in their Manhattan castle to celebrate their coming mass suicide), even when this last third turns boldly experimental (as we read the tone-poem rantings of one of these semi-insane dog's personal journal). It's really for all these reasons that the novel was treated as a mainstream, general-interest book when it first came out, despite it sounding at first like a story only a fanboy could love; it's because Bakis really is that good a storyteller, that she can manage to make this engaging to professors, suburban moms, and all kinds of other types who never in a million years thought they'd ever get caught up in the machinations of six-foot-tall monocle-sporting Great Danes who have had their front paws surgically replaced with prosthetic human hands.

These days, of course, post-Buffy and post-Lost and post-steampunk, the utter originality of this story doesn't have quite the same impact; but believe me when I say that when it first came out in the '90s, it rather literally blew off the tops of the heads of all my circle of friends and myself, and in fact I think it's fair to say that neither the urban fantasy nor steampunk genres would be quite as rich today without groundbreakers like this one that paved the way. Bakis intimated in her email to me that she might never write another novel again, so let me be the first to bemoan in public what a profound shame this would be; reading it again this month for the first time in half a decade, I was reminded all over again of what a nearly perfect novel it in fact is, and that the literary arts in general could really benefit from another tale with this level of sophistication and sheer beauty again. Here's hoping that Bakis will indeed pull up those bootstraps and crank out another modern classic again; but in the meanwhile, we still have this magnificent first volume, which I highly encourage all my fellow genre fans to devour soon if they never have before.”

• Rated 5 stars

“A strangely fascinating story that will have your imagination soaring and dreaming of the possibility of the amazing race of monster dogs. Every page had me wishing it was real and it was convincing enough that I could believe it. ”

• Rated 4 stars

“Wonderful story about the arrival of a non-human intelligent species in NYC. Prettily written, thoughtfully laid out. Recommended. I look forward to more books by this author. ”

• Rated 0 stars

“A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated for a hundred years, the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them. They are wealthy and glamorous and seem to lead charmed lives - but they find adjusting to the modern world difficult, and when a young woman, Cleo Pira, befriends them, she discovers that a strange, incurable illness threatens them all with extinction. When the dogs construct their dream home, a fantastic castle on the Lower East Side, and barricade themselves inside, Cleo finds herself one of the few human witnesses to a mad, lavish party that may prove to be the final act in the drama of the lives of the monster dogs.

”