All Them Dogs - Djamel White
I'm not going to bury the lede here - I've just read my favourite book of the year so far. All Them Dogs is getting a 9 out of 10 from me, and it's gone straight to the top of my Booker longlist rankings. This is the eighth book from the longlist that I've made my way through this year, and it's the best of the lot.
I always love it when the Booker recognises genre fiction, and when I'm working through the longlist I like to give myself a palate cleanser between books, especially after something heavy. I'd just finished Missouri Williams' The Vivisectors and was gearing up for exactly that kind of reset but decided to jump into another Booker read instead. It turns out the Booker judges had prepared a cleanse for me.
All Them Dogs is a proper thriller, and it wouldn't look at all out of place on a CWA Daggers longlist. The Daggers work retrospectively, so anything published this year will be up for consideration next year, and I would be very surprised if this doesn't get a nod when that rolls around.
I sometimes find the books I love the most are the hardest to write about. There's less friction, less to pick at, because I just tore through it and had a brilliant time. So let me just say plainly that the writing is excellent. The prose is taut, tight, snappy, and paced in a way that makes it a proper page-turner. I read it fast and I loved every page of it.
I really loved the version of queer masculinity on display here. It's common for queerness in men to be written as soft, feminine, or androgynous, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but it's rare to see something hyper-masculine and aggressive get the same treatment. I want to be clear that this isn't aspirational stuff. The men in this book are awful, violent bastards. But there's something refreshing about awful, violent, gay bastards, and about the fact that their queerness isn't the point of the book. It's just a fact about them, presented the same way it would be if they were straight, and I really appreciated that.
I grew up under Section 28, working out my own sexuality with basically no representation like this anywhere near me. I'm sure books like this existed back then and I just never came across them, but it would have meant a lot to see this kind of queer masculinity on the page as a teenager. I'm glad it exists now.
It's gripping, it's funny, it's tragic, it's sad, it's violent. It's everything I want out of a thriller, and it's easily my book of the year so far.