The Black Dog Eats the City by Chris Kelso

I read a lot of experimental fiction, and I love the way this story is presented: a bit of flash, some poetry, and even graphic content. Overall, I loved this bold, DIFFERENT story.

but it shouldn’t be that much work to read, so I took half a star off for that, too. Yes, I could blow it up, read it, shrink it, move to the next panel, blow it up. Also, the graphic novel had dialog balloons were too small to read on my Kindle. I would like to give the book five stars, but I took off half a star for typos that pulled me out of my reading (not the on-purpose typos that added to the story, but the accidental ones). It’s disturbing, but I couldn’t put it down. This book at times gave me A Clockwork Orange vibe. There are also no quotation marks in dialog, parenthetical asides that go four-deep into the parentheses, a sentence that’s repeated 30 times in a row, and an on-purpose logic flaw regarding a dead entity or maybe two (trying not to give any spoilers). (Yeah, so don’t read this book if you’re feeling blue.)Īs far as the non-traditional storytelling parts go, there is a short graphic novel among the pages, and there’s a script in the middle of the book. The Black Dog is now a disease “ten times worse” than depression. Kelso takes depression, the black dog, and extrapolates its place in a dystopian future. It’s not a light read with the philosophizing and existentialism and the tendrils of depression. Kelso creates a gritty, grimy near future: smog, noise, indifference, and hiding in one’s shell. This near-future horror story is an example of non-traditional structure or experimental fiction that still manages to be captivating.

The Black Dog Eats the City by Chris Kelso