A GIRL AND HER DOG AND ME

A sardonically zany debut novel focuses on a man who kills his girlfriend’s dog—and suffers the consequences.

As Stetz’s book opens, Brian and Amanda are living together in San Diego and seem perfectly happy, with only one little six-pound problem: Boo Boo, Amanda’s beloved dog. Amanda is devoted to Boo Boo, buys him noise-canceling headphones, and fixes him gourmet meals. Although this doesn’t stop her from having a healthy personal and sexual relationship with Brian, it takes up a large amount of her attention. Brian feels like an interloper in his own relationship, and, to make matters worse, he’s convinced that Boo Boo likes to torment him. So one day when Amanda is out shopping and Brian discovers that Boo Boo has pooped in one of his shoes, he impulsively grabs the dog and hurls him through the patio door to the backyard. The problem? The patio door is still closed (“Damn window washers; they’re good”). Boo Boo dies, and Brian is faced with the horrible prospect of telling Amanda. Almost immediately, he decides to begin “the lie parade” and cover up what he’s done, but it ends up being useless. Once Amanda begins telling her story to the world, explosions start going off in Brian’s life. He loses his job and seems permanently blacklisted from finding another; he becomes an infamous figure on social media and in the news; he’s attacked by former flings and accused of further monstrosities; and he’s eventually charged for the killing of Boo Boo and must find a lawyer and face a trial. Along the way, he’s got to deal with the fact that he is now a societal villain.

Stetz’s decision to refrain from making the philandering, callous, self-absorbed, dog-murdering Brian in any way a sympathetic character at first seems counterintuitive, particularly given the book’s slyly dark final twist. The decision takes the normal machinery of the redemption arc narrative and tilts it off-center in interesting ways. As his life slowly, systematically falls apart, Brian encounters strata of society he’d never experienced before, from prison (where a canine killer is scorned even by men who beat their wives) and the courtroom to the shadowy world of dogfighting in the American South (disgraced former NFL quarterback and convicted dogfight impresario Michael Vick comes up more than once in the book). Throughout all of this, Brian is never likable, and the narrative tone surrounding him—that in the final analysis, what he did to Boo Boo doesn’t really warrant all the subsequent fuss, and that the extent of that ruckus is the novel’s comic heart—will leave no readers doubting where they stand. Dog lovers who don’t find the subject at all funny, particularly when the work’s broader narrative never condemns the crime, might not stick around to follow Brian’s adventures. Other readers will doubtless appreciate the quippy dark humor Stetz deploys effectively alongside some more serious insights into human nature. “I was hurting,” Brian thinks at one point. “You do weird things when you hurt. You look to ease the pain.” None of these insights will bridge the divide for readers who consider Brian irredeemable, but for others, this dark farce will provide amusement.

An intriguing, polarizing tale about a man facing a new life after doing the unforgivable.