Dogtangle

A giant knot of dogs hovers over the city of Business Park in this exuberant, Pynchonesque satire from Huffman (Cover Not Final). The absurdist tale of corporate overreach opens with a power couple’s meet-cute at a heated city council meeting (convened in the Town Hall-Taco Bell) and races through their nuptials to their inexplicable invention of the Hypermutt. Designed seemingly only to foil logic and a corporate board “scared of the vision,” a dog that folds in on itself and “becomes all dogs,” until it is “the idea of a dog,” this genetically volatile, multiheaded creature subsumes every canine it encounters, until the “writhing mass” blots out Florida in satellite images. Megacorporations—themselves the mongrel products of unlikely mergers—monetize catastrophe with protective domes and “support prongs” to hold up a sky that’s become a “thick blanket of dog.” Huffman layers in fresh intrigues: a kidnapping, ESP research, even an interlude set in a feudal past. The result is breathlessly discursive, coherent page-to-page but perplexing as a whole. Like Pynchon, Huffman has a flair for character names—Caressa Vignette, Vernon Smilth, Councilman Burg—but it’s his stylized, almost baroquely cartoony figures that steal the show. His cubist spin on mid-century comics illustration syncs lithe linework and ingenious use of negative space to the frenzied pace of the story. The result is a deliriously inventive send-up of corporate hubris. (Nov.)