Can A Horror Story Work With An Animal Narrator?

I’m back with another Amy Cross book. Yes, I do read other things. Today we’re going to talk about her post-apocalyptic zombie book

The Dog. It uses a technique I haven’t seen successfully in years, and to be perfectly honest, I approached this book with skepticism.

On the surface, The Dog, seems like your typical post-apocalyptic zombie novel. It takes place just as the world comes crashing down the infection spreads. At this point in time, no one knows what’s going on or even that it’s happening.

The dog knows though and this is the technique that is so hard to pull off successfully. What am I talking about?

Simply this.

The world we see is told from The Dog’s point of view.

This changes everything about it. The dog knows things that people don’t. He notices when the communication goes down because he can hear the constant electric buzzing stop. He notices the moment when people change because their smell changes.

Though we see things through the dogs eyes, we experience it through his senses, mostly smell and hearing. We also see things that the dog doesn’t understand but that we as humans know only too well.

For example when the dog’s owner gets sick and throws the dog out, we know he’s trying to protect his pet. The dog doesn’t and tries to get back in. Once he does, he no longer recognizes his owner because he smells different. There’s no conflicting loyalty in the dogs’ mind because he’s not confused by visual input, just scent. That thing is not his owner. He knows this.

It’s very hard to pull of this kind of POV successfully. Far too often, it comes across as either preachy, or juvenile. In fact, I’d go as far to say that no one’s done it successfully since Black Beauty.

It’s also interesting to note that Black Beauty was an adult’s book when it came out but was regulated to children’s literature because the narrator is a horse.

That’s unlikely to happen to The Dog. Since it’s Amy Cross, it has some extreme gore and some cringe-worthy not-for-children-moments.

Still, if you want to see a great modern example of an animal-based narrator that sweeps you up into heir world and makes you forget you’re human, read The Dog.

Just be forewarned; because the narrator is a dog, this isn’t a typical zombie book. Zombies have no interest in dogs, so they pose no threat to him. All the dog’s threats come from humans.

The complete immersion in the character being a dog is what makes this story so powerful.