Barking by Tom Holt

This is a very random Tom Holt book: he's done one something like this pretty much every year for the past forty, and this is the one from 2007. I came to it because I found it randomly and cheaply a few months ago, and I'd read his When It's a Jar equally randomly early in 2024 and liked it.

Barking is...just fine. I found it somewhat less interesting than Jar, though it's a perfectly cromulent humorous fantasy that does everything it needs to do and tells a pleasant story well. I may need to check to see which Holt books are generally considered best and read those first: anyone who does so many books in the same genre is going to have a lot at about the same level of ambition and a few above or below that.

(I might have been hoping for more, since the books by Holt's alter ego, K.J. Parker, have all - at least the ones I've read - been spiky, interesting, smart things. But Holt is much more crowd-pleasing than Parker is, and I get the sense that his books have, not so much a formula, but maybe a recipe to make sure they have the things his audience wants.)

Anyway, Barking is about a lawyer named Duncan Hughes. He works at a horrible London firm doing tedious work, and is what I think is the usual early-thirties sad-sack Holt protagonist, with a failed marriage behind him and nothing whatsoever interesting in his life. But he lives in a Tom Holt world, so he's thrown into supernatural doings.

His old pack of schoolmates have formed a highly successful firm, and their leader, Luke Ferris, is suddenly trying to recruit him, really hard.

I don't want to say all of Holt's books get schematic, but this one definitely does. You see, both werewolves and vampires are real, and both of them run law firms. As far as we see, the werewolves are all men and the vampires are all women, and they are mortal enemies in a very British, fair-play kind of way, not so much trying to kill each other (both groups are very very very resistant to harm) as trying to get one over on the others. Oddly, this doesn't seem to come out in legal ways - Holt doesn't talk about major litigation or complex M&A work to confound the other side.

(Holt himself was a lawyer in Somerset. I don't want to cast aspersions on his knowledge of the field he worked in in his own country, but none of these big high-powered London law firms feel big or high-powered; they seem to be organized like a minor city's second-tier solicitors, and do that kind of work. And none of the lawyers seem to actually be experts in their practice areas the way I'd expect.)

So the werewolves/men are eternally feuding with vampires/women - we also learn that there are other packs of werewolves (one is made up of dentists, so maybe it's just these two firms of lawyers? There's a lot that's vague and half-explained in this world, to keep it light and amusing.) Holt is otherwise resolutely heterosexual here - there's not an inkling that all these furry men who spend all day every day with each other, bonding and running in the woods and doing all sorts of physical activity together, are more than just mates. Although...Luke does very very strongly warn Duncan away from "their sort," and that seems to mean women as much as it does vampires, inasmuch as the book makes any distinction between the two, which is not a whole lot.

There are further complications, of course. But that's the beginning: Duncan becomes a werewolf, becomes a partner in a better firm, turns into a dog in the moonlight to chase foxes with his pack, is warned to avoid vampires because they have cooties, that sort of thing.

He of course has A Destiny because he Is Special. There is a unicorn that signposts this and keeps showing up throughout the novel, which leads into the main plot, which I won't go into great detail about. Of course Duncan wins free in the end, conquers all enemies, and wins the appropriate gorgeous female (who otherwise barely shows up in the book and doesn't have an appreciable personality) as his trophy.

Again, I found this pleasant and entertaining but also facile and obvious. And these lawyers are working at a much lower, duller level than I expected, from doing marketing to actual high-powered lawyers for the past decade. So I may be back for more Tom Holt, but I expect to be substantially pickier the next time.