They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.’
Invisible Dogs is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs – but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.
‘Invisible Dogs is such a direct, lucid text that the reader might mistake it for a simple record of a visit to an authoritarian country. But Boyle’s wry and wiry prose, an invisible dog in itself, makes an eye contact you can’t break and produces thereafter a quietly deadly picture of the viewed and the viewer, the destination and the traveller.’
– M. John Harrison
‘Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.’
– Ali Smith