Dog lovers love Lost Dogs, my 2014 post-apocalypse novel told from the point of view of a German Shepherd named Buddy. A question readers often ask me is how I came up with the story.
One afternoon soon after I finished drafting Dragontamer’s Daughters (which would have been either late 2010 or very early 2011), I was dog-sitting for my mother, who lives about 15 minutes from me. I had not yet published DTD, but I was contemplating what I would write next.
While I was at my mother’s house, I flipped on the TV while I hung out with her dogs. She had left it on The History Channel, and it was showing a speculative program called Life After People.
The premise of this series is that for reasons not explained, humanity has suddenly vanished from Earth. What, the show asks, would happen in the days, weeks, months, decades, even centuries afterward?
When would the power go out? How long could your car sit before it wouldn’t start again? How soon would it be before the shrubs you planted grew large enough to engulf your house? And–in one segment–what would happen to our dogs?
The short answer: it wouldn’t be pretty (see 7:53 to 10:55 in the video below)
Watching that piece, I thought, “Hey, I could do a whole book like that.” So, I did, albeit a little less brutal (if you can believe it) than the video postulates.
I’ve always liked German Shepherds, and have always wanted to own one, so I chose one for the protagonist. The main characters of my previous book had been females, so I made this one a male. And so, “Buddy” came to be.
Almost all of the other characters were original creations, with much of each dog’s personality shaped by their breed. For example, Border Collies are very intelligent, agile, and energetic, so Rex is, too. Rottweilers are very quite, so Jake doesn’t say much. And so on. I didn’t always stick to that formula: Pomeranians are actually much more fierce than Penny and Poppy, but I only intended for those adorable puffballs to be comic relief.
A few of the characters are based on real people and dogs. The human Roy is a mash-up of three older gentlemen, all combat veterans, whom I have known and respected. The feral dog who tells Buddy how to hunt geese is based on a half-wild stray that we brought home and named “Daisy.” And because she was such a character in her own right, I used our Beagle/Basset Hound mix Cecilia, changing the character’s name back to “Sally.”
The hardest part of creating the characters was coming up with suitable names. For a number of reasons (which are too involved to get into now), I wanted most of the dogs to have very human names: there is no “Fido” or “Spot” to be found in the book. “Rex” was originally “Max,” before I saw another book that had a Border Collie with that name, but seeing as how “rex” means “king” in Latin, it’s appropriate for him.
“Lil” was always meant to be a “bad dog,” but she went through several name changes. For quite a while, for no particular reason, she was “Katie,” but I changed that because I know several Katie’s in real life, and I didn’t want any of them to think that I had named an actual evil bitch after them. I settled on “Lil” because it’s short for “Lilith,” the villainess from the Bible (there’s a huge religious component to Lost Dogs that maybe I’ll talk about some other time).
I call Lost Dogs a “science fiction” novel not because the dogs fly spaceships or shoot laser guns at each other, but because there’s an awful lot of zoology woven through it. I did quite a bit of research (Alexandra Horowitz’s non-fiction book Inside of a Dog was particularly illuminating) to portray, as best I could, how the world must appear to them.
Where our primary sense is sight, followed by hearing, their most important sense is smell, followed by hearing. Sight is considerably less important, and for them, it’s different than what we usually think. For example, dogs see much better in the dark than we do (admittedly, not as well as cats), and they are not totally colorblind, though they do not perceive reds and greens as we do.
Because they perceive the world differently, and because their intelligence is different than ours, I created a “canine vocabulary” for them, a simplified way to refer to the places, objects, and creatures around them.
To the characters in Lost Dogs, all other dogs are “Friends” (in keeping with their pack mentality); humans are “Belongings” (in that, dogs and people belong to each other); birds are “Flaps” (because that’s how they fly); and grass is “Yellow” (because that’s how it appears to them). I got the idea for this “doggy language” from the classic novel Watership Down, a huge inspiration for Lost Dogs.
I deliberately left vague the identity, motivations, and ways of the “Lights” that bring about the end of the world. Are they aliens? Are they angels of death? Something else? The human Roy understands hardly anything about them, so they are far beyond the dogs’ comprehension, though Buddy and Rex come closest, at the climax of the book.
The “Lights” play a big part in Stray Cats, the follow-up to Lost Dogs that I hope to release later this year, so keep your eyes open for that. Much more about them will be revealed….
Post-apocalypse stories are almost always set on a very big scale–Stephen King’s The Stand spans most of the entire United States–but I wanted to do something smaller, in keeping with the dogs’ perceptions: to them, where they live is the whole world.
King places many of his stories in Maine, where he lives, so I did something similar and set Lost Dogs on Kent Island, Maryland. It was a great deal of fun to mention local landmarks, even if some of them (like the farm where Buddy encounters the cows) are no longer there.
As I alluded to, there’s more to discuss about Lost Dogs, but I need to get back to writing. If you’ve read and enjoyed the book, I hope you’ll leave a review here, to help other people find out about it.
Many of the characters–Buddy, Sally, Rex, Jake, Penny, and Roy–make appearances under very different circumstances (which I can’t explain without spoilers) in my dark fantasy novel This Wasted Land. And several of them appear again in Stray Cats, of which you can sign up here to receive an free excerpt from.
I’ll have more about Lost Dogs and Stray Cats some other time….