Read: Rover Red Charlie By Garth Ennis and Michael Dipascale
Atomic Dog: Ain't nothing but the dog in me.
I think canine-perspective literature (or really animal-perspective more broadly speaking) needs its own respectable genre. The act of attempting to describe the world through the eyes of a dog has a certain talent to it. This book displays that talent well and this review is one not intended for the creators of this book but meant for the dogs out there. If you’re reading this review then I hope you have some sort of appreciation for the canine species. And if you do, then please check out Rover Red Charlie. On one hand, it fulfills the increasingly popular niche of post-apocolyptia in media these day, of which I am admittedly addicted.
This story requires you to make the same leap that all animal-perspective literature provides: How can all these animals use language and English but are still so “dumb” to the world in their own respect? And to that I say shut the fuck up. When you woke up this morning you lied to yourself about something. Something! I don’t know what but it was fucking something! So, before you decide to spend time reading this review any further but are also someone who cannot suspend their reality enough to learn something from this literary exercise, then what the fuck are you even doing on Substack?
The dogs in this novel don’t just have their own personalities, they have relatable ones on a various levels. Both to the personal level in which we can see ourselves in them but also in a way in which we can specifically se a more childish of version of ourselves attempting to navigate the world with limited information. Like dogs do. To that end, the personalities are also relatable in that one can remember meeting actual dogs like these too. The dogs this tale revolves around are all the types we’re familiar with here is the U.S.
Is this novel basically like reading through Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel and subsequent 1963 movie The Incredible Journey? Yes. It is, albeit a bit more “adult” natured and without the obvious animal torture happening in just the movie trailer alone. That said, its yet another tale about animals in which more is revealed about human behavior than anything else. I mean after all, that’s all we have to go on and truth even Sheila Burnford states that her original tale wasn’t necessarily even meant for children. This is merely an mature anthropomorphic exercise that starts and ends with us forcing human-beliefs on beings that don’t have a choice in the matter. But at the very least, this does a good job to glorify the dogs and remind the human reader to think a little further about the world we force these animals to live within.
Snag a copy of the trade paperback for a quick read.
Stay Honest.
