Ten years after the publication of his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Dogland, Will Shetterly has produced a sequel, "The Gospel of the Knife." Gospel's a very different book, but not without prodigious charms of its own.
Dogland is one of my all-time favorite books, a piece of gentle American magic realism about Chris Nix, whose obsessive, authoritarian (but lovable) father moves his family to Florida in the fifties to open a dog amusement park, showcasing 200 breeds of dog. The Nixes end up ensnared in local southern race politics, and in Florida's mystical Spanish past, and the resulting story is such a surprising, seamless blend of the historical and the fantastic that it is like a series of small, satisfying surprises, leading up to a wonderful, giant surprise.
Gospel of the Knife is set a decade later, and Chris is a long-hair teenager in the southland, dreaming of San Francisco, harassed by the local rednecks, and locked in a death-struggle with his father over individual rights and parental authority. Gospel gets weird fast, and matter-of-factly. Magical stuff just starts to happen, and in the best tradition of contemporary fantasy, Shetterly doesn't let his characters dwell too much on the magic, just has it stir and shake their lives in ways that are absolutely engrossing.
This is a neat trick, and it's one that Shetterly is very good at. I loved practically everything about this book — with the exception of the ending, which wasn't really to my taste. Still, in a book with as much going for it as this one does, it's easy to overlook a few subjective flaws.
Update: Will Shetterly corrects me: "While I'm delighted that you think Dogland won the World Fantasy Award, it wasn't even on the final ballot. Except in the universe you read it in, relaxing in a Zeppelin somewhere over Free North America on your way to consult with President Lessig about turning the recently liberated Disney cities into true centers of shared culture."
