Dog! A paranormal urban fantasy by Mike Robbins

http://www.amazon.com/Dog-Youll-Never-Look-Again-ebook/dp/B015WVZDN0

Dog! is a powerful story of love and loss, sin, redemption and dog mess. You’ll never see your pet the same way again

In the summer of 1975 a Welsh hypnotist, Arnall Bloxham, startled everyone in Britain in a TV program in which he regressed three subjects to their past lives. One had served on a ship of the line in the Napoleonic Wars; another remembered being a hunter-gatherer in the prehistoric  Balkans; and another recounted fleeing from a pogrom in medieval York. The programme, The Bloxham Tapes, generated some debate.

Writer Mike Robbins never quite forgot it. What happened after death? If you were reborn, would it be as a human again, and if not, why not? Forty years later, stuck on a book that was going too slowly, he broke off to write the novella Dog!, the story of an elderly rescue dog who is not quite what he seems. What if that pug you saw in the park was actually Henry VIII?

The dog’s owner is a cheerful slob called Bazza, a university lecturer in a provincial English city. When not teaching logical positivism or medieval ontology, Bazza chills with a spliff and a beer or browses porn sites. He’s also adopted an old dog, but finds it dour and unaffectionate. Still, the two of them live together happily enough, despite the dog’s contempt for humans and its habit of licking itself in front of guests. Then a Himalayan monk comes to stay for a few weeks while teaching courses in the city. He senses at once that there is something strange about the dog. He is right.

But perhaps that’s all we should give away. Except that, as the book’s blurb says: “Dog! is a powerful story of love and loss, sin, redemption and dog mess. You’ll never see your pet the same way again.”