Hammer of the Dogs by Jarret Keene
Early in Jarret Keene's novel Hammer of the Dogs, the protagonist, Lash, sees the writing on the wall: "Only Godless Machines Survive" (3). It is a quote from evolutionary biologist Robert Duncan (a fictional stand-in for Richard Dawkins), written in a flood channel under Las Vegas by "mercs" controlled by Richter, the novel's early antagonist and Lash's later love interest, who works for an aging matriarch called Westphal. In this postapocalyptic adventure novel with an academic's heart, this moment indexes some of the main tensions the novel treats: technology/the human; secularism/the divine; socialism/capitalism; survival/extinction. In the novel Lash is raised by a religious sect that worships the coming "Cyborg-Christ" (6), which is led by Prof, a recluse who trains children at the Academy to fight his holy war against Richter in an isolated and dying Las Vegas. Operating squarely in the purview of The Hunger Games and Divergent novels, with a bit of Harry Potter, The Hammer of the Dogs brings an anarchistic glee to the postapocalyptic genre and uses the cityscape of Las Vegas to great effect.
Las Vegas, a city famous for excess, is now a shell of its former self. The hotels and suburbs are destroyed and empty, the surviving population living meager lives in constant fear of drones patrolling the skies. In this bleak landscape, technology is simultaneously the cause of the cataclysm that precedes the events of the narrative, the main mode of violence in the novel, the center of the strange cyborg religion that has grown up in the detritus of civilization, and the tool through which Lash and the other characters fight for their freedom. In the end, technology is a tool that can but should not replace the human. The cyborg dream that Prof represents, a clear nod to the utopian and spiritual posthumanism of thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, is a dream that is truly more of a nightmare, evidenced in the novel [End Page 175] by technological innovations ranging from weaponized robots to genetically altered carnivorous flamingoes.
Undergirding this skepticism of technology is a continuous stream of references to popular culture from before the collapse. Lash listens to Alice Cooper on a Sony Walkman and waxes poetic about burgers and fries; she loves the film Gremlins and wears a shirt sporting a Slayer logo. The novel's references include David Lynch's Dune, the Moon Knight comics, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Battle-star Galactica, and Disney's The Black Hole. The constant inclusion of popular culture here operates similarly as in works like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao: they are a source of inspiration for the characters, a point of reference by which they can assess their current degradation. Contrary to the kind of postapocalyptic fiction Mark Payne studies in Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction (Princeton UP, 2020), in which a "reset by a power external" to humankind "rescales human aspirations for a better life from illusory macro social goals to the level of individual capabilities grounded in the human body" (3), the popular culture represented in Keene's novel is the best of modernity and worth preserving.
Keene's treatment of modernity, however, is not singular and one-sided. Rather, the novel and its characters live in between the dichotomies that made up the pre-apocalypse world, sides of which Prof and Westphal represent. While Prof espouses a religious utopia, Westphal represents a possible return to capitalism. The main characters, however, fall somewhere in the middle; Richter best expresses the sentiment when he says to Lash, "'I really hope we're not talking religion and politics. I want you to teach these kids to be productive and successful'" (82). The main characters, minors and young adults all, are neither rebuilding the world nor saving it. Rather, they are engaged in creating something new, something different, something that has not been seen before and that cannot be foretold.
The in-betweenness the characters inhabit is matched by the status of the setting of the novel: Las Vegas. This is a novel entranced with the city through and through, putting it in conversation with novels like The Water Knife. But whereas in that novel Las Vegas represents the dangers of the present and the fears of the future, in Keene's imagination Las Vegas is a space for restoration, a place [End Page 176] where a freer future is possible. Indeed, Vegas is portrayed as revolutionary and generative.
