Somewhere in the American south, a starving beagle wanders out of the woods and eats from a dish left on a porch. A man comes out with a knife and takes his tail, then starts on an ear. The dog is too weak to bite through the man’s gloves. He is saved by a woman he will love for the rest of his life, whose name for him is Babykins, and who will not, under any circumstances, be handed over. Blacktail by Scott Hawkins is a novel about a wolf who has decided that human beings must be answered for. Its best chapter is the one where that dog stands in his way.
The Chapter Where Scott Hawkins Argues Against Himself
The novel’s hero is a half-wolf on a long walk south, sent by an ancient cat witch to find a god who has been asleep for an age. His mother was shot. His mate was chained in a garden and did not survive what was done to her there. He has concluded that the arrangement between people and animals is not predation but a broken covenant, and that it is owed a reckoning.
For six chapters, nothing in the book seriously contests this. Then he walks into a clearing outside a suburban house and meets a pack that will not let him pass.
They are ridiculous. A small brown terrier who is a priest and knows it. An enormous Great Dane in a collar who lies badly. A war dog called Sarge, back from a desert somewhere with the pack of green, who is the only one of them fit to fight. A fat beagle with one long scar down an ear. They worship the woman inside the house. They call her Mercy, and the name is what they mean by her. Blacktail by Scott Hawkins has been building for two hundred pages toward the idea that the tenderness of humans is a lie told to slaves, and here it puts five animals in the road to say that it is not.
A Beagle Called Babykins
What lifts this above a set-piece is that the book gives the opposition the strongest version of its case and refuses to undercut it.
The terrier asks the hero what the essence of the hunt is. When he answers that it is faith, faith in yourself and faith in your skill, the terrier points out that faith is also the essence of a pack: that you will be found worthy, that your clan will not forsake you. He suggests, politely, that there might be more than one path to the same hill. It is a good argument. Nothing in the novel refutes it.
Sarge, who has killed more men than the hero has and knows exactly what he is refusing, says plainly that for him the hunt has ended and that this was a choice rather than a defeat. And the beagle, who is not bright and knows he is not bright, offers the only defence he can think of, which is to tell the visitor how much they love her, and is told gently by his priest that love has been dead in this one for a long time.
They lose. Of course they lose. But the way Blacktail by Scott Hawkins stages the loss is the most interesting decision in the novel: the pack is not stupid, not cowardly, and not wrong about their own lives. They are simply outmatched by something that has stopped being a wolf. And the scene ends with a woman who could have run standing between the hero and her dog with a broken stick in her hand, which is the one thing the hero’s entire philosophy says she will not do.
What the Novel Believes
It is worth being clear that Blacktail by Scott Hawkins is a religious book, not a fable with a moral. The hunt is presented as divine design: you kill to eat, you are eaten to feed, prey and hunter both have faith in the arrangement. Humanity’s fall, in the novel’s account, was to pray for exemption from that order, be refused, and go looking for a god who would grant it instead. The dominion given over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air is quoted back at an archangel by name, and the archangel does not have a good answer.
That framing explains why the violence in the book is sorted so strangely. Animals killing animals is holy and often funny. What is unforgivable is the roadkill left uneaten, the laboratory, the dog abandoned at a trailhead, the litter destroyed on an operating table. The novel is not squeamish. It is furious about waste, and the distinction turns out to carry the whole argument.
Where Blacktail by Scott Hawkins Overreaches
Four things strain Blacktail by Scott Hawkins.
- The journey is episodic. Each stop is a self-contained short story, and two of them could be lifted out without the book noticing they were gone.
- A long detour into a human killer’s mind is the section that most tests good faith. It exists to prove a point about who really lives outside the pack, and it costs more than it earns.
- The hero’s growth is reported rather than shown. Every few chapters, another creature is astonished at how large he has become. The reader mostly takes it on trust.
- The final act is enormous. Where the story ends is genuinely daring, and the machinery assembled to get there has enough moving parts that the seams show.
Readers who want the same theological fury in a different shape should go to King Sorrow by Joe Hill, which is similarly interested in what a bargain costs. Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney shares the unblinking attention to what happens to bodies. And Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson offers invented ecology without the grief, for anyone who wants the pleasures and not the wound. On content, this novel is relentless about harm to animals: vivisection, mutilation, abandonment, starvation, and the death of young. It also contains the killing of a child, torture, and cannibalism.
What It Leaves Behind
Late on, an old cat who has spent four hundred years looking for someone capable of this is asked how she did it. She says there was no spell. She only pointed him in a direction, and the reason it worked was that he never knew his father’s name, so nothing he might become was ever ruled out in advance. It is a strange, lovely piece of theology, and it lands because the novel has spent its length demonstrating the opposite in everyone else: a chihuahua bred into idiocy, a beagle who cannot imagine wanting anything but a hand on his head, a war dog who chose his cage and would choose it again. Blacktail by Scott Hawkins is savage, frequently very funny, and considerably angrier than it is sad. What stays afterwards is not the wolf. It is a small fat dog with half an ear, planted between an army and the person who fed him, who cannot win and does not move.