By Steve Danziger
If a Las Vegan imagines their city as a dystopian war zone, is this dread, wishful thinking, or the most obvious metaphor they could devise? Hammer of the Dogs, a novel by Jarret Keene, reads like all three simultaneously. Keene, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has written numerous books on the city and its denizens, and edited several anthologies using the city as setting for a host of explorations into genre and the fantastic. Now he’s created a fully realized postapocalyptic Las Vegas that manages to encompass the ethics of machine warfare, dubious child-rearing, religion, survival, and heavy metal while being one of the most sheerly enjoyable dystopian tales I’ve ever read.
The story follows Lash, a twenty-one-year-old member of the Academy, a survival training school for the young located in the Luxor hotel and run by a post-apocalyptic Fagin named Prof. His vision for the future revolves around the coming of a digital messiah, a “techno-savior [that] would bring with him an explosion of computing superintelligence. The result would be the augmentation of human bodies, followed by the unification of souls with the mind of the Cyborg-Christ.” Until then, “Prof conscripted kids to fight with drones, patrolling the valley in search of evil. He encouraged hormone-addled teenagers to serve as judges, jurors, executioners. They presided, decided, and snuffed with the press of a button.” Whether this is a cause of, or response to, the constant state of warfare involving a dizzying number of drones and the resulting blizzards of shrapnel that result from their (and their targets’) destruction, remains ambiguous. As for Lash, while she has her doubts about Prof’s redemption strategy, she figures, “the Academy wasn’t perfect. But it was the singular force […] that protected Las Vegas from monsters.”
The main monster, and Prof’s chief competition for the hearts, minds, and firepower of the young, is Richter. A sadistic freak holed up in CityCenter, he plots the slaughter of the Academy’s youth, updates his website to include snuff films of his recent kills, and expounds on his philosophy, which is firmly Anti-Cyborg-Christ:
Richter’s philosophy was that man was the ultimate mechanism and that contraptions merely did his bidding. To see a man-machine connection, or the cyborg, as divine was bunk. […] Drones weren’t evidence of our status as chosen people. They were implements with which we carved out our hungers and ignited our lusts. They were machines that enable men to become gods.
Richter has certainly inspired Lash’s long-enduring hunger: “She’s fantasized all year about incinerating Richter’s cruel and handsome face.” But once Richter captures Lash, it turns out that not only is Richter not the monster Prof made him out to be, he possesses a much more benevolent, and much less deranged, plan for rebuilding society. Plus, he helps instigate her sensual awakening by distancing her from Prof’s brainwashing and rat dinners at the Academy toward a pleasurable existence at CityCenter that includes jazz, books, hair styling, clean sheets, and doughnuts. Moreover, he will help Lash find her father, who has found himself a member of a gas-huffing tribe of cannibals in possession of nuclear warheads, so beyond reason that they’ve lost the sense to even bury their own shit.
What ensues is a journey through a badass young woman’s confusions, both philosophical and libidinal cast as an adventure narrative of uncommon thematic richness and exhilaratingly chaotic energy. Lash’s battles simply never stop. She has to contend with both her burgeoning sexuality and a host of phallic menaces—pseudo-conscious firearms, snakebots, that nuclear warhead, “A fifty-foot-tall reservoir boring beast” called “the Driller”—while reconciling her feelings about Richter and his somewhat flexible concepts of patriarchal government. She has lives to save, among them friends and wards at the Academy, her father, and Richter’s siblings, held captive by a financier guarded by genetically modified killer flamingos, not to mention all of Las Vegas from the increasingly deranged Prof, who’s determined to set off the post-apocalypse apocalypse, “reboot” mankind, and bring on salvation, Cyborg-Savior style.
Like the best books of its genre, Hammer of the Dogs engagingly provides excessive, outlandish, yet disturbingly plausible characters, settings, and events. It evokes a feeling of inevitability, yet never loses its sense of spontaneity as it pulls us toward it. And in this tale of a young woman not entirely sure where to channel her sense of purpose, struggling by turns with and against egomaniacal men determined to shape the future, Keene offers the ultimate thematic cold comfort: no matter how much technology we find ourselves reliant upon or endangered by, humans will always be humans, alas.
