Bad Dog John Philpin | ISBN : 0-9823594-5-4

Bad Dog

Author: John Philpin

Publisher: GenPop Books

Publication Date: 02 January, 2012

ISBN: 9780982359457

Pages: 220

Subjects: Mystery, War and military

Available as: , Trade Paper, 978-0-9823594-5-7

Description:

The time is 1968. The time is the present. BAD DOG is the fictional memoir of a first-generation American, a writer disillusioned with the last half century of his country’s history. He is a kid who graduated first from Boston’s Roxbury streets then from Harvard, a man in his sixties watching Vietnam replayed in Iraq, a draft dodger from a family of veterans, a young man whose promise to a child to find her missing friend is more important than his flight to Canada to avoid trial for draft evasion. With a Vermont double homicide and kidnapping at its center, BAD DOG takes the reader from a rural farmhouse into a tale about foreign wars and the lies that have led us into wars, a tale of living through two bouts of national madness. ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BAD DOG“BAD DOG is a remarkable novel in more ways than one, starting with the dialogue. It's smart and fast and real, bare of explication, the kind of talk screenwriters aim for. Philpin, though, does something I've never quite seen before, embedding the distilled dialogue in a narrative that almost seems an opposite language—a wildly diffusive monologue inside the teller's brain, ranging unrestricted through memories, riffs on history, outbreaks of anger, the lost dreams of America. On the way to breaking the standard rules of fiction, BAD DOG delivers something that lies at the heart of every novel—our need to make sense of the world.”— Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth.“BAD DOG is a fictional memoir about crime and life by an author who understands both well. At the center of the tale is a double murder and the abduction of a child, but the biggest crimes of all are the lies perpetrated by a government bound and determined to wage war. Head down the rabbit holes of Vietnam and Iraq with a trippy, disillusioned guide who refuses to dance to the drumbeats of death. You'll feel compelled to read non-stop but forced to pause to contemplate the truths on each page. An unforgettable read.”—Diane Fanning, author of ten works of true-crime and five mystery novels including Twisted Reason, the most recent in the Lucinda Pierce series.“Philpin starts at a flat run and never once slows down. Here is murder and kidnapping seen through the lens of a good-hearted draft dodger whose mantra is ‘Reality does not have my consent.’”—Jessie Hunter, author of Blood Music.“You may ask yourself, as I did, as you tiptoe into the first chapter, ‘Am I in the novel or is this a forward?’ Oh you are in it alright. In it deep! And the gauntlet is thrown early and often.”—Jym Fahey, author, poet, musician, and the mind behind the liner notes to the Jimi Hendrix album Axis: Bold as Love.

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2011-11-14

Criminal profiler and psychologist Philpin (The Murder Channel) disappoints in this mystery that's less about crime and more about politics. In what his publisher calls both an "autobiographical" fiction and a "fictional memoir," Philpin's unnamed narrator is an aging, paranoid, antiwar, antiestablishment recluse hiding out in Vermont in 2007 ("I left the larger world in the late 1960s," he says). Complaints about political and moral corruption, past and present, abound when the narrator isn't lost in recollection of the heady Vietnam era, when he was a draft dodger with Canada in his sights. In Vermont, when doing someone a favor, he stumbles upon the scene of a double murder and the apparent kidnapping of a teenage girl, and impulsively takes two crucial pieces of evidence. Through an unconvincing series of convenient links he comes to uncover a group of drug-addled Vietnam vets whose wartime criminal activity in Saigon has destroyed some and driven others to greater desperation. As our amateur sleuth crosses country and globe (who's paying for all this travel?), he uncovers the teenager's fate and the story behind Saigon. A promising premise is greatly diluted by numerous distracting screeds about everything that is wrong with the world. Agent: Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.