First published 2017
The monster dogs arrive in New York City with their surgical scars still visible, walking upright in Victorian dress. These creatures were bred by Prussian scientists who grafted human intelligence onto canine bodies, creating beings caught between two worlds. Cleo Pira watches as the dogs struggle to find their place in modern society, speaking in cultured voices while their animal instincts pull them toward something darker. The dogs carry the weight of their brutal creation, remembering the laboratory where they were transformed and the masters who abandoned them. As they attempt to build lives among humans, their hybrid nature creates tensions that threaten to tear apart everything they've tried to construct. The story follows their desperate search for belonging in a world that sees them as curiosities rather than beings worthy of understanding. Bakis examines what happens when the boundaries between species dissolve, revealing the animal nature that lurks beneath human civilization and the human yearning that emerges from modified beasts.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, fantasy, 21st-century
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: New York City, Prussia
Period: 19th-century, 20th-century
322 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: body-horror, violence