The Dogs: Not Exactly Night - Preface
This book could very well be real - and you would never know it. The places in it are, with one salient exception, true - the people are people you've probably met. It does not take place in some faux-Florida, some faux-America - not at all. Read close, and read carefully: if you think you've been in those places, or you've talked to these people, then you probably have, you probably did.
So this could not be a work of fiction at all, but something torn from reality - perchance not this reality, perchance not this dimension that we live and work and love and die in, but another one altogether...identical, in every respect, except that, from the imagination of the ancients whom we unwisely scoff at, stalks, lurking and leering, something horrifying...or, indeed, not horrifying at all, but transcendently beautiful.
But which is it? Horrifying - or beautiful?
To which it may be suggested - can it, in fact, be both?
For the line between man and beast - and dog - is so thin as to be immaterial. The descent - or perhaps ascent? - of the were-animal is representative, after all, of the human behaving, for once in his life, truthfully...he becomes, at last, his true form, overriding his ostensibly pious but in fact grotesquely subversive life-programming to physically manifest as a liminal dream of fur and flesh. A were-animal is feared and reviled, because he behaves as an animal does - he behaves as man ought to, as man should. For what manner of friend is man, to man's best friend - and to himself - as he struts about, the naked ape, the hairless prodigy? When he would slough off the burdens of manhood - he becomes something eldritch, but only at first, because true beauty is a part of wonder, and parcel to wonder - is terror.
The dream of being something more - or less - than human is maybe the oldest one; how else to explain the yawning mass of legendry associated with the topic? And it need not be fiction, either: Diogenes wanted to live as a dog, because dogs are vastly more honest than humans could ever hope to be - and he's right, you know. Think of all the complications we could avoid if we were allowed to bite our enemies, or lick our friends, and have no need for pretending or diplomacy! Because, as it is, Homo homini lupus, Freud, by way of Plautus, reminds us - presumably he should know. Sophocles knew of such things, too: pretending that the Lykaia was not at all about supple teenage Greek boys fucking each other and eating human flesh so they could turn into werewolves, but instead some clever metaphor for what the tyrant does to his subjects. But knowing Plato and his times - perhaps the truth was far stranger, and the story more bizarre, then we can give it credit for.
But there is a basic truth here: the wildness that dwells within all humans is never expressed, truthfully, as it should be. It is instead permanently repressed for the sake of living in a soi-disant civilized world - sterilized and sanitized, free of all things muddy, mossy, grassy, and wooden. And this is called progress, and this is called culture. And so, repressed forever, that same wondrous wildness comes out, unhealthy, like a suppurating wound, in pus-laden droplets - cruelty, rapaciousness, avarice, all the excesses of capitalism, essentially...the world out of balance.
The were-animal - wolf, naturally, but also fox, bear, lion, tiger, jaguar, coyote, any quadruped mammal that slathers its fangs to destroy and consume - brings back that balance. Perhaps, in lieu of this, we befriend the dog, we put our nose to that of the horse, and watch them with silent, never-expressed envy of how they, unlike us, may roam free, pissing on whatever they like.
That's a vulgar way of putting it, of course - but how else can we measure man, if not by measuring him as beast? It is, as was said, the oldest question of being a man - that of not being one at all.
So it is possible this book is real - in another plane of the same reality as this one. Look closely - it is this world, the one we know and live in, but the key difference being that the darkness that lurks in the dusty pages of myth and legend are given shape...beautiful, terrible, but firmly corporeal, shape.
It is a recognizable world even if, second by second in our own world, we cannot recognize ourselves. So think - and think hard. Remember, always, where you - the reader - came from. We are never very far away from being animals - we are never very far from being dogs.