Date: 21.01.09
Journey: Traveling north on the Victoria Line.
Reader: Looked a bit like one of those comedians who appear on panel shows and is quite funny, but not enough to be a name you’d have on the tip of your tongue. Wears glasses? Looks constipated?
Title: “Sick Puppy”
Author: Carl H?a?a?a?sen
Review: You know when you see something and don’t really ‘see’ it, but then do? You observe but don’t take note of the details? A bit like walking past the same washing machine day after day when suddenly you realize there’s a dog in there looking forlorn and covered in soap suds*. Well it was only a bit like that. I must have looked at this guy sitting opposite me a half dozen times between Brixton and Pimlico. I registered a 30-something man in a beige coat, dark trousers; unkempt matted black hair with milk bottle glasses hunched forward. Nothing else. I didn’t pay him any more or less attention than I paid the other passengers until he raised the book on his lap to turn a page. A flash the colour of pea soup puke drew my attention to the paperback’s cover: a revolting neon green affair with the Words “Carl H__?___” (something Scandinavian with too many ‘a’s and ending with ‘sen’), “Sick Puppy” and a blue splodge I later discovered to be the face of the puppy in question.
I remembered this group (our group on facebook) and how I wanted to post a review so I set to work making mental notes. As people have commented, the opportunity to see both cover and content can be limited, but as luck would have it my reader stayed glued to his seat at Victoria leafing through the text. In the commotion I took the seat next to him without any protest, strange looks or knife crimes and then ‘acted casual’. Trying to ignore my new friend’s stale body odor, I leaned as close as I dared to commit my socio-literary [?] crime.
Immediately I was rewarded with this choice line from page 198: ‘McGuinn jumped on the bed and began licking her.’ Or something to that effect.
A few lines later I discovered McGuinn was a dog and that changed the whole context of the scenario I’d been imagining barely seconds before. There’s nothing like a salacious hook to pull you in! Like those brothels in Amsterdam where the hot girls parade in the windows and the ones inside look like soulless smacked up bag ladies. Or so I’m told. Anyway it was affection of a canine nature, which I can only hope was platonic, and the paragraph was promptly cut short by grubby thumb sporting a hangnail. Contrary to popular belief hangnails are more to do with dry skin than vitamin deficiency. Just throwing that one out there.
A double space told me the narrative had jumped through space and time somehow and led me to a section concerning a “Mr. Gash”; who, with such a name, could only be the villain of this piece. Mr. Gash was listening to a compilation album similar to the type that the QVC robots try to flog you as you mistakenly land on their channel searching for something better than 90′s Top Gear on Dave. Only this was no “Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits”. It transpired Mr. Gash was listening to a compilation of the most horrific 911 emergency calls. So now I could deduce this was a satirical story based in America, one that did not take itself seriously, with a dog called McGuinn and a probable bad guy named Mr. Gash. Regarding plot what followed brought me only questions.
A transcription of the emergency call detailed a concerned 911 dispatcher trying to assist a girl whose brother had stabbed their other brother. She was hiding in their bathroom as the stabbed brother lay bleeding to death in the hallway and the brother with the knife drank a beer in the kitchen. In a satirical example of insane censorship the girls swearing was [bleeped] out but her screams, as the brother with the knife broke through the bathroom door, were not. I donÕt care what some reviews say; I’d rather listen to the latest Killers album over that any day.
It’s such a shame when families can’t get along. Granted Youtube provides endless hours of hilarious dysfunctional families from Springer, Maury and Ricki Lake, but it is a sorry state of affairs. Don’t get me wrong, I like to see idiots smashing chairs over each others heads as much as the next man, but it is all a little bit grubby. I mean I have a brother and we argue, but there’s an unwritten rule about not stabbing one another to death.
Just as the carnage in the excerpt was unfolding, my literary limpet was prised off the hull of this particular reader’s ship [too obscure?]. He hotfooted it out of the carriage at Oxford Circus, shoving the toxic coloured tome into an oversized pocket as he went, with his scarf flapping after him. I realized two things at that moment: One – I didn’t ever want a job as an emergency dispatcher, and two – I didn’t ever want to be stabbed by my brother. As the doors closed behind him I realized a third indisputable thing – I was supposed to have got out at Oxford Circus.
Two pages, that’s all I’ve got on this book, regarding the plot I can’t begin to imagine what McGuinn and Mr.Gash got up to… I just hope the golden rule of any Hollywood disaster movie applied: however inexplicable, the dog must survive.
Thanks for reading.
Russ Booth (via email/Facebook group)
*This actually happened to me when I lived in Madrid; unknown to me at the time Madrid is home to the inventor of the pet-washer. Muy bien.
