Portrait of a Crush: Kirstin Bakis' "Lives of the Monster Dogs"

(Due to a computer glitch, I lost the end of this essay. My apologies.)

It was page 20 that it first occurred to me. Last weekend I had been in St. Louis, doing yet another spoken word show at yet another pretentious non-smoking coffeehouse hooked up to yet another pretentious bookstore, yammering away and selling my novel out of my backpack like a goddamned Deadhead. I had a little cash in my pocket and about five cups of coffee in my stomach and decided to go buy... something in the bookstore. Anything. Something to read on the trip back to Chicago.

I was flipping through the staff's picks for the week, perusing work of some note and some interest, when I came across Kirsten Bakis' first novel, intriguingly titled Lives of the Monster Dogs. My mind immediately flashed back to about a year ago, when I had been patiently waiting to see my doctor about this nagging ear infection (of which I still have) and, flipping through the current issue of People magazine, I ran into a full page article about this very book, when it was first released. In typical People fashion, there was a large black-and-white photo of the author accompanying the article, dressed if I correctly recall in some vague black-leatherish outfit, slick-looking short black hair, really cute in that New-York-Intellectual-Neurotic-Jew kind of way, roughly the same age as me (late twenties/early thirties, I guessed), posing next to a giant bronze statue of a dog which I assumed to be in NYC's Central Park. The plot of the book sounded interesting enough--a contemporary gothic horror story about a group of superintelligent, talking dogs who suddenly appear in current-day Manhattan, quoting literature, walking on their hind legs, prosthetic hands surgically attached where paws should be, wearing 19th-century Victorian clothes. But, you know... People magazine? Talking dogs? First novel? How good could the book be, you know? Still, I ripped the page out of the magazine and took it home with me that day, for no other reason than she was cute and I should remind myself to maybe read the book one day, and upon returning home promptly threw it on one of my unending stacks of loose papers in my apartment.

There at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, a year later, I picked up the now-paperback version and glanced through some of the reviews. There sure were a lot of them.

"Haunting, fiercely original..." New York Times Book Review. Hmm.

"This is the way, one thinks, new talent should make its debut: in exuberant, reckless, and intelligent play." Boston Sunday Globe. Well, well.

"A revelation.... [It] makes most other first novels look like self-absorbed pap." New York Daily News. Oh my... hey, wait a minute! My first novel's been published, and I don't think I'd exactly call it self-absorbed pap! Jeez, how good could one's first novel be? I was determined now. Fiercely original, my ass. I'm gonna buy this book and I'm gonna read it and we'll just see how "fiercely original" it is! Ah-hah!

So, it was 20 pages into it that I first realized. The book, in its barest bones, is about an undergraduate journalist named Cleo Pira who accidentally meets one of the monster dogs and becomes the group's sole human contact, an official go-between to explain the history of these mutants to the rest of the world. In hindsight she is explaining to us what she was doing the day the first dog arrived in Manhattan via helicopter to almost no fanfare, most believing the entire thing to be an elaborate hoax. Cleo's boyfriend at the time, she explains, had recently broken up with her and she was feeling incredibly depressed about it, so decided to take her dog out for a walk and try to cheer up. She sits and watches the river for a moment:

"At that moment, lightning struck the New Jersey shore, across the water, directly in front of me. If you had been watching from the street, the bolt probably would have seemed to go right through my head. And at that exact instant--or really just a fraction of a second beforehand--my heart broke. I don't know how to describe it except to say that. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Something just burst out and flooded down, all the way to my thighs, and it was exactly like liquid wax. And right then, as I was looking up at the sky and it was cut in half by the lightning bolt and my heart split open, the helicopter entered my field of vision."

Reading this paragraph was like having the book itself reach out and slap me across the face as hard as it could. The passage was so beautiful and remarkable, so full of plain truth while being utterly poetic at the same time. An incident of such magic can only be gotten away with in the context of a novel, and not only that, but a good novel--such a plainly ridiculous event that could never actually happen in real life but yet so completely wonderful that it just melts your heart when you read it.

I read this page 20 then stopped for a moment, looked up and out through the windshield of the truck in which I was currently riding back to Chicago, just stopped and looked out the windshield and contemplated for a moment. And it was at that exact moment that I realized.

"My God. You know what? I think I'm falling in love with Kirsten Bakis."

Now that I have a couple of books under my belt with independent presses, my biggest push this year has now been to try to get a national mainstream publisher to accept one of my novels. It's important to me; after all, this is what I'm attempting to do for a living, and while publishing with small presses is great and affords a lot of creative control as well as political freedom, the simple fact is that you can't pay your bills with the money you receive from small press publishing. I am determined that by my 30th birthday I will have a contract with a RandomHouse, or a Simon & Schuster, or a St. Martins Press.

I like to fantasize about the moment this will happen in the future. I like to fantasize being in a Manhattan office, scraping the New York sky, signing a dotted line while a group of smiling middle-aged executives stand in a circle, eager to finally complete these last few months of negotiations. I finish my signature and they politely applaud, slap my back, shake my hand. Finally one of the men in the back--the president of HarperCollins, for example--comes up slowly and hands me an oversized golden key.

"Here you are," he says. "Welcome to the Club."

"What is this?" I ask.

"Oh. The Club. Don't you know about The Club?" He slaps his forehead with his hand. "Wait, of course you don't know! You've never published a mainstream novel before!" All the executives giggle wildly in the 54th floor conference room.

Suddenly I am whisked away to a world I could only imagine before. My novel is released and suddenly I have become a character in one of the good Woody Allen films (not the bad ones). I am being invited to parties chock-full of witty famous intellectuals, rubbing elbows alongside them, suddenly no longer One of Them but One of Us. I am drinking merlot on a Central Park West penthouse balcony with the darlings of the art world, independent filmmakers, young men and women who get to be in GAP khaki ads and make guest appearances on MTV. Who drop by Conan O'Brien one night 'cause hell, they're bored. Hell, I'm dropping by Conan O'Brien now. Shit, I've got a book out with RandomHouse! I'm a member of the intellectual glitterati!

I know, the thought that I would become an instant celebrity with the publishing of my first national novel and suddenly be invited to join an elusive Club because I have now been deemed worthy enough to be a "member of the circle" is a pretty ridiculous thought. Yet in many ways it is this exact fantasy and the images of wealth and power that it conjures that fuels Ms. Bakis' novel so much, that adds such a sense of pleasure to the story, an element to simply let yourself curl up in and get lost on a quiet night in your apartment or the corner of a coffeehouse.

Ms. Bakis makes two very astute decisions early in her book, decisions that not only allow her to justify many of the nagging doubts readers will have about a story concerning talking dogs (more on this later) but also allow her to have a successful Gothic horror novel while still in a contemporary setting (in fact, not even contemporary but future -- the year 2009, to be exact). First: she makes the dogs rich. Filthy stinkin' rich. Second: she makes the dogs obsessed with Victorian-era Prussia.

The New York of Monster Dogs is the same New York that Bob Kane once talked about when asked what kind of place Gotham City is in his comic strip Batman: "It's New York below 16th Street, above Battery Park, where it is constantly the middle of the night." Ms. Bakis' New York is the old New York, the New York of turreted banks, the New York of terminally tiny streets winding and curving in random directions block by block, tiny streets with really odd names like Bowery and Houston and Commerce. This is the New York of private homes so expensive you could only dream of going to a dinner party there; West Village brownstones full of antique armoires and mahogany rolltop desks, crumbling striped wallpaper and yellowing photographs in handcarved frames hanging in secret bedrooms.

Before starting her book I had been wondering how she was going to be able to write a contemporary novel while still maintaining my absolute favorite elements of Gothic horror: a feeling of secrets behind every door, a feeling of the old-fashioned, of flickering candles and pince-nez's and screaming lunatics in locked towers. Ms. Bakis' solution is so simple as to approach genius--she simply recognizes that there is quite a bit left in New York that really is Gothic horror in real life, and plops her characters in the middle of it. It is but one of several remarkable things she does in the book that raises Monster Dogs from mere genre fiction to the transcendent.

Oh, that was just weird. I'm sitting in a coffeehouse writing this essay, the book lying on the table next to my laptop, and one of the employees walks by, a stunningly beautiful woman who by all sense of cosmic justice shouldn't have to be working at a coffeehouse.

"You read that?" she asks in a clipped, hurried east-coast voice.

"Yeah," I reply. "Have you?"

"Yeah, yeah. Kirsten and I were at the University of Iowa at the same time, so I heard parts of it years ago when she was writing it."

"Wow!" I yell. "Do you know her? What's she like?" Unvoiced questions invariably echo in my head -- "Do you still know her? Do you hang out with her? For the love of God, can you introduce her to me???"

"Oh, nah," she says. "I was just a student. She had a writing fellowship and was already famous by the time she got there. She'd have these public readings of the work and that's how I heard it." She picks the book up, looks at the back cover. "What'd you think?"

"I was fairly overwhelmed by it," I say. "I loved it. What did you think?"

"Oh." She shrugs. "It was okay, you know. I really liked the last twenty pages." She shrugs again. "I don't know. There was just so much goddamn hype about it before it even came out. It kind of tainted my opinion of it." She shrugs a third time and goes back to the counter to go froth and pour some more.

You know, there's certain good things to be said for not being a success yet, for not being an integral part of the publishing world. One of the sincere pleasures in my life right now is going to a bookstore and "discovering" a book that may be hugely famous in the elite incestuous world of the publishing industry but still an unknown to you and me, the average joes. I hate to think that I'd get to a point where the hype surrounding a project is so large that it ruins any chance I'd have to enjoy it. This precise thing used to happen to me when I worked in radio during college, and is one of the biggest reasons I no longer work in the music industry, because it was ruining my chance to enjoy bands anymore. It's why I think that almost every artistic critic in mainstream journalism sucks, because they have gotten so embroiled in the marketing side of their industry that they can no longer see the forest for the trees. It's why I refuse to accept a day job at a publishing company, despite the protestations of my friends that it would be "a perfect job for me" and garner a sizable salary.

I hate to think of the idea that I had gone to college to study writing, that I had spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life honing my craft, just to be 29 and working a lousy six bucks an hour job at some franchise coffeehouse where they believe you so stupid they remind you in the bathroom that you have to wash your hands after you urinate. And that meanwhile the other losers you went to college with are now getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for their book that you just know isn't as good as yours, that they're getting called "fiercely original" by the New York Times and drinking merlot with Joyce Carol Oates on a Central Park West penthouse balcony. And that you are so bitter over this fact that you can no longer even enjoy the simple act of reading a book.

I love reading books. It's why I write. I sincerely enjoy the act of getting sucked into a book, of reading for hours on end with no sense of time passing by you. I love it when something in a novel makes me cry and all of a sudden I realize I'm crying and I think, "Okay, how stupid am I, I'm sitting here crying," but oh you love it, you know you do, and you laugh at yourself and sniffle and wipe your eyes and take another drink of the cheapass red wine you're drinking out of a paper cup in your studio apartment.

I love reading books. That's why I write. God, would I hate to lose that.

Upon hearing of a novel about talking Victorian dogs in present-day New York, one might be tempted, as I was, to start listing a litany of credibility questions in your head, a detailed list of "Yeah, but how..."s and "Oh right, how do you get away with..."s and the like, much as when you're eight years old and watching a Roadrunner cartoon and yell at the screen, "Oh, the coyote just fell a thousand feet and got hit by a rock and blown up, and now he's walking around again! Yeah, right, I'm so sure! What the fuck!" Okay, maybe not the "what the fuck" part.

In fact this is the most difficult part of being a genre writer, this foundation of credibility, this process of writing a fantastical story that yet feels real, feels like it could really happen, that unconsciously answers all the nagging questions you have in the back of your head while being scarcely aware you even had the questions in the first place. I never appreciated the complexity of this endeavor until I attempted my first science fiction novel two years ago, a genre I was raised on and still intimately enjoy. Exactly one chapter into it I had created so many plot holes and dangling questions of credibility that I made Independence Day look like a goddamn Fellini film. I wisely hung up the project until, at some point in the future when I am an exponentially better writer than I am now, I can come back to it.

In the case of Monster Dogs Ms. Bakis has taken on a second, even more formidable, challenge, which is basically to write a Frankensteinesque story and make it stand up in the middle of our modern world. There's no explaining away frightened townspeople by saying, "Well, they're ignorant peasants. Of course they believe in the monster!" No simple excuses of lagging technology to explain mass confusion. No shadowy fortresses and basement laboratories in Transylvania.

As mentioned, Ms. Bakis' justification of credibility is ingenious simply by its very lack of complexity: She has taken a lot of time and a lot of thought expressly finding those parts of our modern world that really do mirror Victorian creepiness or mass hysteria and transplanted her made-up world into this real world. A few examples:

The very first question I had when I started reading was, "Well, how the hell are you going to introduce 150 walking, talking dogs to the modern world and not have everyone fuckin' freak out? How do you keep from having the government swoop in and capture the dogs and stick them all in a secret laboratory under some mountain in Nevada?"

Ms. Bakis' answer is simple, really (and don't worry, I'm not going to reveal anything in this essay that you wouldn't discover yourself in the first thirty pages of the novel): Have the dogs go to New York. The general consensus of the jaded Manhattanites is that the whole thing is a hoax, an elaborate and expensive one, but what the hell, the hoax is so much fun and so ingenious that sure, they'll go along with it. Monster dogs? Great. Living in penthouses? Fine. Going on the Tonight Show? Wonderful! Boy, I can't wait to see who the twisted rich fuck is who invented this con. Bill Gates? Ted Turner? Why'd they do it? Who would spend the millions of dollars this is costing to perpetrate this? And in typical east-coast fashion, the dogs stick around so long that people simply forget about the hoax and just accept them as part of their Big Apple landscape.

Second question: "In the age of radio, television, the internet, and investigative journalism, how the hell do you invent a breed of superdogs and keep it a complete secret from the rest of the world?" The answer is a little more complicated but not only fully answers the question but is also the catalyst behind so much of the "classic" Gothic horror elements of this novel. Answer: Make the entire project a military one. And not only military, but the result of the military obsession of the Germans at the turn of the last century.

It's already a true fact that the obsessions of the German aristocracy in the last hundred years have approached the truly bizarre: radical experiments with mind-altering drugs, attempts to actually realize Frankenstein-type surgery on real patients, just to name a few. King Wilhelm II, the real ruler of the German Empire for a time and a man known for his bizarre obsessions with radical armies and zombified soldiers, here becomes a historical fiction character, one who decides that if a country was to own a race of highly intelligent dogs, able to wield weapons with prosthetic hands, able to understand orders given by humans and speak back to them, but still maintaining the fierce loyalty and bloodthirsty nature that dogs naturally have, this country would in a very short time become the leaders of the free world.

Introduce to this situation a truly fictional character, Augustus Rank, perhaps the most mad of all the mad scientists ever in literature: A man who, as a child, delighted in stabbing small animals just for the thrill of watching them die; a man so obsessed with grafting animal parts onto other animals that it approached sexual fetish; a man who started his medical career while a teenager by sneaking into his neighbor's barn one night and surgically switching a cow's left and right legs so that the cow not only remained alive but could actually walk again. Rank and Wilhelm randomly meet one day, discover their mutual obsession with animal prosthetics, and soon a secret military project is underway in an underground lab in Prussia.

Eventually Rank realizes that the project cannot be finished in the 15 year deadline but may possibly take 60 or 70 years. He of course does the logical mad scientist thing, which is to quietly rob the German aristocracy of millions of dollars worth of jewels and coins, and under cover of night sneak all his scientists out of the country to set up an even more secret society in the wilds of Canada.

Also in typical mad scientist fashion, his cohorts are fiercely devoted to Rank, displaying a zealousness approaching religion, so when Rank finally dies the group still steadily plugs along with The Project (as it's now known) for decades, still securely hidden in their self-contained village. The group consciously decides to maintain the air of Victorian-age Prussia, which explains why the dogs are so obsessed with it. The group also has no need to ever spend the spoils of the German coiffers they have stolen, which explains why the dogs are so filthy rich when they reach New York.

"Yeah, but why are the dogs in New York?" you may ask. "What happened to the scientists? Why'd they leave the village?" Ah, but this answer is a much more complicated one, an answer that in actuality makes up the fundamental emotional core of this book. It is an answer that is in reality a bigger question, one that makes you lie in bed at night sleepless, staring at the ceiling wondering about the question yourself. It is an answer that not only makes Lives of the Monster Dogs one of the greatest anthropomorphic novels ever written, but also, I would claim, simply one of the best books I have ever read in my life. From any age. From any writer.

In this little fantasy world of mine where I am signed to RandomHouse and become an overnight sensation and they make "Absolut Pettus" ads and I am drinking merlot on a Central Park West penthouse balcony, I am of course drinking this merlot in the company of all the contemporary writers I so love and respect. It is a smaller subsect of this fantasy of mine, a fantasy that is really more of a conspiracy theory: that every mainstream novelist alive somehow knows all the other mainstream novelists and that they are constantly running into each other at parties and bars and hanging out at book signings together and discussing philosophical literary topics into the wee hours of the night.

And hell, why not believe this? After all, in my life so far as a successful underground author, I do hang out with almost all the other serious writers in Chicago. I'm friends with all of them, and we do run into each other at parties and bars, we do go to book signings together, and we do indeed discuss philosophical literary topics into the wee hours of the night. Does this change when one gets "big?" I'm not "big" so I don't know. Perhaps I am an anomoly, for I'm a novelist who nonetheless enjoys doing performance poetry, enjoys jumping on stage and yelling and screaming and drinking too much and hitting on women and being the center of attention and making a big boisterous fool of myself in public. That's not typical, I know. Most novelists become novelists because they are fundamentally shy people, people much more comfortable sitting in the corner observing the human condition and then writing about it.

But still. My brother lives in New York. He knows a lot of people. His roommate hangs out in artistic circles. He knows a lot of people. Hell, I know a lot of writers in New York now, because of my experiences with my own novel and going on the road endlessly supporting it. It is not an unreasonable scenario that sometime in the next year I will find myself in the same room as Kirsten Bakis--maybe not a Central Park West penthouse balcony, but perhaps a refurbished flat at 4th and D. Maybe a poetry slam at the Nuyorican. Maybe I'll stumble across her email address and compulsively send her this essay and maybe she'll be so tickled by it that we form a correspondence and we end up specifically making plans to meet each other for a drink the next time I'm in New York.

And so what then? What exactly does one say to a person who has executed a creative project that is so moving, that is so profound, that is so deep and beautiful and magical and stirring that it sincerely changes the way you look at the world around you? Again, I don't know. What would I say if I met David Foster Wallace? Douglas Coupland? Liz Phair? Well, okay, I've actually met Liz Phair so I know what'd I do: I'd stammer and stutter and say something mind-numbingly stupid and make a complete fool out of myself.

Maybe this is my point. Is it even possible to realistically get involved with someone that creates such a profound work, that you are in such awe of? I know how I act on a regular basis around the local artists I'm in awe of. It never gets better. I keep thinking, "I've known them for years now. I've hung out with them. I've gotten drunk with them. Eventually I'll calm down and stop acting like such a star-struck child around them." Nope, there she is again, and here I am again, stammering and stuttering and saying mind-numbingly stupid things again and just falling all over myself and peeing in my pants (well... metaphorically).

I am looking at the back-cover photograph of Ms. Bakis right now as I write this paragraph. There's something important to remember that maybe I haven't quite gotten across yet: physically speaking, she's very, very attractive, attractive enough that my head would turn in a bar, even not knowing who she was or what she did for a living. It's not a classic beauty, not a beauty that every man would go "oh mama" or whatever the typical man does. It's that intuitive, intelligent beauty, that look in the face, that twinkle in the eye that screams out that the person is smart and sensitive and artistic and just makes me go gaga, just makes me want to grab their waist and lean them down and kiss them like that Times Square photograph from the end of World War II.

Do you ever look at an author's photograph and wonder about their lives? What makes them tick, what makes them laugh, what makes them cry? Why they chose that outfit for the photo shoot? What bands they like? What novels have made them go nuts? I do, all the time. As I'm writing this paragraph I know exactly four things about Kirsten Bakis: that she lives in New York City; that she is the recipient of a Teaching/Writing Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that she is also the recipient of a grant from the Michener/Copernicus Society of America (of which I haven't the slightest clue what this is but sounds cool as hell); and that this is her first novel. I know all this because that is the entire content of her back-cover bio.

Is she married? Her acknowledgments don't list anyone with the same last name as hers... but as we all know this means absolutely nothing. Who took the photograph? Gasper Tringale. Yeah, I know-- "Huh?" Is he a hired hand? A trusted confidant? Someone who has seen her naked? Maybe she's a lesbian. Her physical appearance doesn't rule out the possibility. Neither does the fact that, as an adult and attractive woman, she still took the time and effort to write an entire novel about talking Victorian dogs hatched by a sadistic mad scientist in the employ of the German military. Is she a nerd? Can she recite Monty Python quotes? Is she hopelessly obsessed with Gothic horror herself? Is that why she wrote the novel?

I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I'm gonna have to do an internet search soon and see what I can find out. Damn, I wish I could find that People article from last year.

Copyright 1998, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.