I gotta hand it to Jason McKinney, author of Dog World. He came up with an original take on werewolves. Set on the battlefields of Iraq in 2005, a military command post is overrun by what they first report as large dogs. Sent to investigate the strange reports, a second group is attacked and looses contact with its base for several minutes, but then comes on the radio to report they are on their way back with wounded.
Something just doesn't feel right about the communication to DeMarti, the officer in charge, and he puts his soldiers on alert. Despite precautions, when the troops return they turn into large, savage canine-like creatures and begin attacking their own troops. Thus begins the story of a plot by werewolves to infiltrate governments and the military and lay in wait until the time is right for them to take over the world and start treating the humans as the cattle they are to the lycans.
Gradually we're introduced to a good size cast of main characters. There's Paul DeMarti; Patrick Lewis, his second in commend; Gloria Tan, a gung-ho young soldier; Cameron Mitchell, a werewolf who is among the human sympathizers of her kind; Brenda Walinski, a copter pilot who receives a serious head injury and recovers only to find out she's sharing her brain with two other personalities and the ability to detect werewolves; and Major Omi Kunpai, the officer assigned to find out what happened in the desert. Joining them later is a trio of survivors from a British unit, scientists and military brass. Much of the first third of the book is spent introducing these characters (and others) who will play roles in the story.
From there most of the characters are taken to a military base in the U.S. where they are held and debriefed. It is there that they learn that they have allies among the lycans who oppose the Aberration's plan for world domination. Some of those opponents come from unlikely sources like the military and the government. Gradually the group, humans and lycans, form a team to challenge the Aberration and its leader, one of the first werewolves, begin its all-out offensive to take over the world.
I'm of two minds when it comes to Dog World (which I guess you could say is one mind less than Walinski's character). On the one hand Dog World is a thoroughly original take on the whole werewolf genre. The lycan backstory is fully realized, going back to the days when the Black Plague was ravaging Europe. Since then werewolves have been living among the human herd undetected, except by their victims. I applaud McKinney for that rare accomplishment in what I assume is his first novel.
On the other hand, the book is so riddled with typos and other errors that it sometimes pulled me out of the flow of the story entirely. Sometimes the errors were fairly minor (a frequent misuse of "to" for "too" or a word left out of a sentence). Sometimes the errors are factual, as when a character scans 660 degrees of the horizon fairly early in the book. (Really? Is the story set in a alternate universe where circles have 660 degrees? Or did he turn a full circle and 5/6ths of another?) In another scene he has someone schooled in psychology describe Walinski as having a "split personality." I don't think that term has been used by anyone in the field of mental health in decades. Instead the term is multiple personality disorder or possibly even disassociative disorder. There are also numerous formatting issues where the margins change in the middle of a page, but those I can blame on the Kindle formatting and not the author.
I hope Mr. McKinney won't find this criticism too discouraging. The fact that he can spin a good yarn is 80 percent of what it takes to write a novel. I'm just hoping that in the future he'll take the time to have his work professionally edited and proofread. As is it, it seems he depended mostly on SpellCheck as his editing source. SpellCheck can be useful when you're writing a letter, but it fails to check context or other issues that authors need to be aware of.
So here's my overall verdict on Dog World: Story and originality, 5 stars; Editing, 3 stars. Overall, a 4-star review.
And as a post script, it's obvious that Mr. McKinney plans a sequel since this one ends on such a downbeat cliffhanger (no spoilers here!) - a sort of Apocalypse Howl. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how he continues the story of Dog World.
