But Baxter isn't a horror genre monster. A more apt title for this novel would have been Stranger in a Strange Land, though of course that was taken.

What's the story? Baxter is an alien. Okay, he's a dog, but he lives among humans, an alien species that he finds variously contemptible, confusing, pathetic, stupid, attractive or worthy of respect, depending on the person and the situation.

While the story is told from the points of view of at least a dozen different characters, all residing in the same small town, Baxter is the only one whose voice we read in the first person singular—until the last page of the book when a shift from third person to first person concludes the narrative with a silent explosion of devastating dramatic intensity.

While Baxter does some horrible things—murder, infanticide— his alienated and sociopathic reality isn't in and of itself horrible because he's a dog. His lack of interest in the value of human life and human morality can be safely presumed by any reader with only the slightest knowledge of the natural world and the behavior of animals. (Animals even including humans, sadly, the difference being our need to invent contorted rationalizations for our atrocities.)

It's interesting to note how Greenhall steers his characters and the story away from the direction that, say, Stephen King might have taken it.

When Baxter ends up as the companion to a thirteen-year-old psychopathic boy obsessed with Hitler and sexually aroused by violence, who sees in Baxter an instrument and a weapon more than a companion, you might find yourself thinking of Idle Hands and of course Cujo.

The boy builds a pit in which he wants Baxter to fight and kill other dogs. Eventually he puts another boy in there, a younger child, and turns Baxter loose on him as well.

In most writers' hands, that's probably what would happen. It seems like the standard way to escalate everything and move the plot forward. I can imagine a writer being steered in that direction in a creative writing class just as I can imagine any number of professional writers instinctively going that way.

But Ken Greenhall was a true original with a twisted and unique vision. You'll have to read it to find out what happens.