**This review comes from the ML Vault, but is part of our series on books essential to the Werewolf/Shapeshifter subgenre**
Harper, 2008
ISBN: 978-0061430220
Available: New
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow is the best urban dark fiction since S.P. Somtow. Sharp Teeth is a widely heralded innovative novel, a modern werewolf (werecanine in any case) story written entirely in verse. This is a visceral, raw story, a complicated, many-faceted tale with everything save for the most important bits gnawed out.
Sharp Teeth follows Lark, a complicated, near enlightened man who is trying to lead his pack of modern werecanines to be
more than their beasts, but somehow sees his pack fall to a pack of mutt scum. The new pack shuns the path of calm resolve, instead indulging in the appetites and greed of the street, made all the more powerful by their supernatural predatory abilities. While the new pack can’t let Lark survive, Lark can’t let his rage at a the loss of a good thing go. Also waiting in the shadows are more dogs, each with a burning rage, or a rotting sorrow within and all set to collide for dominance and vengeance in the arid desert outside of L.A.
Sharp Teeth expands outside of the horror genre, outside fiction, outside the mind of man and the soul of dog. A dark urban-fairy tale, if you buy only one dark fiction book for your public or private collection this year it should be Sharp Teeth.