INTPartist

I went to a Goodwill today (my friend needed help carrying a couch and we practiced good social distancing!) and I found a DOOZY of a book. It’s called Decoded Dog, so I picked it up thinking “oh cool, a book about dog behavior or genetics or something, relevant to my blog an interests!” - I was NOT PREPARED for “A Canine Mystery Novel”

Then I turn it over and BOY HOWDY did I strike gold.

So it’s speculative fiction about a dog pandemic that takes a hard left into the guardrail about 2/3rds of the way through and becomes a big pharma conspiracy thriller with what seems to be (from the brief skimming I did in the car on the way home) a concerning amount of anti-vax sentiment. The author is a PhD geneticist and standard poodle enthusiast, so there are literal whole pages passive-aggressively espousing the merits of poodles written with the poetic nuance of a hard-science dissertation. The rest of the book is mostly pages upon pages of dense, stilted exposition trying desperately to explain graduate-level virology to an audience that would buy a “canine mystery novel”. The author also apparently rescues poodles with Addison’s disease, so there is a ton of information about canine Addison’s shoehorned in throughout - like, enough that it feels like paid product placement but for an adrenal disorder.