BOOK REVIEW: NANCY KRESS, DOGS

Nancy Kress, Dogs, Tachyon Publications, $14.95 (TP), 288 pp. (ISBN: 978-1-892391-78-0).

Terrorism is the big fear of the 21st century. Next to that is the specter of biological weapons, diseases that strike through all defenses to kill without discrimination. Both have genuine roots, the one in 9/11 and the other in new diseases such as ebola.

Ebola is one of potentially many diseases which have not affected people in the past simply because they persisted in areas where people didn't go, so that people did not meet them. But as populations have grown around the world, the human presence--in pursuit of timber, firewood, bushmeat, and more--has pushed into new areas. People have been exposed to new diseases, but what is new is the exposure, not the disease.

If you want a new disease, consider the potentials of genetic engineering. No one has yet crafted a new and horrific bacterium or virus, but the basic technology is developing rapidly, and using may not take the kind of sophisticated equipment and thousands of personnel that an effort to build nuclear weapons takes. In fact, you can buy gene-sequencers on eBay! It may only be a matter of time.

Meanwhile, new diseases, whether run into in the backcountry of Africa or manufactured by an evil-hearted gene tweaker, are the stuff of science fiction. Nancy Kress, rightly renowned for her past work, give us Dogs, in which the sleepy little town of Tyler, Maryland, wakes up to terrifying ferocity. Beloved family pets are suddenly turning vicious and attacking adults and kids. It doesn't take long for the local animal control cop, Jess Langstrom, and the police and medics to call the CDC, nor for Washington to send in FEMA, as ham-handedly clumsy as the worst of its post-Katrina rep. Meanwhile Tessa Sanderson, an ex-FBI agent whose late husband was (horrors!) an Arab, is being told by her ex-bosses that her name and her husband's are coming up in traffic. She's also getting strange emails, and when she starts investigating, she runs into a weird character from her husband's past who seems to think she's his now. And he keeps mentioning dogs.

Meanwhile, back in Tyler, the town is quarantined. The dogs are going wild. The CDC finds a virus attacking rage centers in the brain. FEMA is collecting all the dogs, and people are getting their backs up, crying that "No one messes with my dog!" Some are cleaning their guns and checking the shed out back for old dynamite. Others are saying all the dogs should be killed, right away. A few infected dogs are showing up outside the quarantine cordon. And people who have been bitten are going into comas.

Kress ratchets the tension up and up in a grand display of writerly talent. If you like suspense, you're gonna love this one!