Who’s experimenting on who?

34. Sundial – Catriona Ward

In 1977, a movie called Dogs came out that involved packs of dogs that had been experimented on escaping from the isolated, small university where the experiments had been conducted and attacking people. This is not dissimilar to Sundial, where there is much talk of dogs being experimented on in a very isolated place, Sundial, essentially set up like a research facility/former hippie enclave. However, Sundial is most certainly not a sanctioned research facility where something went wrong and this novel does not seem to be received in the same way that Dogs was. Dogs was a flop and Sundial seems to be taken as a slow, but very original horror novel. For me, it was all right, definitely slow and full of unlikeable characters. And I definitely wouldn’t read it if you cannot abide animal experiments, especially ones where the worst of it is the experimenters really going a long way to rationalize what they’re doing. A protesting too much situation that makes more sense in the end.

The story we get is of Rob and Jack, two young girls, essentially being found feral and growing up in Sundial with those dogs and those experiments and how that upbringing has ripple effects in their adulthood for them as Rob goes to college and really leaves while Jack does not. Rob goes on to have a pretty awful sounding relationship and is writing a novel that keeps intruding in a way I didn’t find useful. However, Rob’s daughters, in particular Callie, who brings home bones and has connections with dead animals and “Pale Callie,” who could be imaginary, remind Rob of how she cannot really escape her past and the issues that happened with her and Jack in Sundial could just be continuing to play out all over again. Rob needs to return to Sundial to potentially find a solution for Callie, or herself, really.

Belvedere and Pickles are comforted with not being the animals in the experiments in a story for once. They were using predators and not prey. Phew for the guinea pigs.