Dogtooth by Fran Lock

Dogtooth is a book about ghosts: ghosts as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends, but also as in the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion.

It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation. There’s folklore in it, the current that we carry and that which carries us; the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories can do. It’s also about memory, the strategies that poetry has for keeping those we’ve lost alive.