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Mad Dog
The haunting story of thirteen-year-old Sheryl-Anne, growing up in 1960s Ontario on a farm steeped in mysticism and madness.
The summer of 1964 – a summer of race riots, mini-skirts and transistor radios. Sheryl-Anne MacRae dreams of fleeing her home in southwestern Ontario to search for her long-lost mother. Her uncle and adopted father, Fergus, a charismatic pharmacist with utopian ideas, brings home a handsome young hitchhiker. The guitar-toting Peter Lucas Angelo bears an uncanny resemblance to James Dean – and Sheryl-Anne falls in love. But life in Eden Valley is not as idyllic as it seems.
As summer progresses, Peter is pulled deeper into Fergus’s bizarre underworld – a world of ’60s counterculture, folklore and apocalyptic visions. The days are spent working in the apple orchard, while the nights descend into dangerous sex, drugs and secret rituals. Sheryl-Anne longs to run away with Peter, as the fragile peace of her daylight existence is eroded by the nightmares that torment her.
In this thrilling tale, Kelly Watt captures the ethereal and complex Sheryl-Anne, and with vivid, often frightening detail charts the destruction of a family. The work of a gifted storyteller, Mad Dog marks the arrival of an exceptional new novelist.
The summer of 1964 – a summer of race riots, mini-skirts and transistor radios. Sheryl-Anne MacRae dreams of fleeing her home in southwestern Ontario to search for her long-lost mother. Her uncle and adopted father, Fergus, a charismatic pharmacist with utopian ideas, brings home a handsome young hitchhiker. The guitar-toting Peter Lucas Angelo bears an uncanny resemblance to James Dean – and Sheryl-Anne falls in love. But life in Eden Valley is not as idyllic as it seems.
As summer progresses, Peter is pulled deeper into Fergus’s bizarre underworld – a world of ’60s counterculture, folklore and apocalyptic visions. The days are spent working in the apple orchard, while the nights descend into dangerous sex, drugs and secret rituals. Sheryl-Anne longs to run away with Peter, as the fragile peace of her daylight existence is eroded by the nightmares that torment her.
In this thrilling tale, Kelly Watt captures the ethereal and complex Sheryl-Anne, and with vivid, often frightening detail charts the destruction of a family. The work of a gifted storyteller, Mad Dog marks the arrival of an exceptional new novelist.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
1 person is currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Kelly Watt
3 books6 followersKelly Watt's poetry, fiction and non-fiction have won awards and been published internationally. Her first collection of poetry, The Weeping Degree was published by Wild Rising Press August (2024) and was a Finalist in the TWSA Awards, U.K. as well as longlisted for the Hamilton Literary Art Award (2025). She has published two other books: the gothic novel Mad Dog, Doubleday Canada, (2001); and the mini travel companion, Camino Meditations: 30 Mindful Walking Meditations to Conquer Addiction and Cultivate Joy, HSE (2014). She has lived in 5 countries but now makes her home outside Hamilton with her husband, and a shy sheepiedoodle.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 4, 2019
This is a very appropriate book for resent times; especially with the #metoo campaign. I thought author, Kelly Watt did a wonderful job of showing physical, emotional, and mental abuse but in a "classy" way. What I mean by this is that there abuse was not given with tons of details as to be a major turn off.
I related to Sheryl in this book. I really felt so bad for her. Her innocence was lost and she was forced to grow up faster than she should have had to. However, I do believe that Sheryl came out stronger and a bit wiser from this horrible ordeal that she experienced.
This book does show that abuse is closer than people like to acknowledge. It sadly comes from family members or those close to others. Yet, with the #metoo campaign and books like this; I think that victims of abuse will come to realize that they are not alone and don't have to stay silent anymore.
I related to Sheryl in this book. I really felt so bad for her. Her innocence was lost and she was forced to grow up faster than she should have had to. However, I do believe that Sheryl came out stronger and a bit wiser from this horrible ordeal that she experienced.
This book does show that abuse is closer than people like to acknowledge. It sadly comes from family members or those close to others. Yet, with the #metoo campaign and books like this; I think that victims of abuse will come to realize that they are not alone and don't have to stay silent anymore.
September 23, 2019
Kelly Watt’s Mad Dog views the idyllic apple orchards of Ontario through the eyes of a lonely fourteen-year-old protagonist who veers between obedient and rebellious as the long hot summer draws on. Her mother disappeared long ago and Sheryl-Ann lives with her aunt, uncle and cousin on a family farm, surrounded by family and isolated from the world. They go to church together on Sundays. They're considered standoffish and odd, but they're part of the community. And in term time Sheryl goes to school and knows other girls seem different. But in summer…
This summer her larger-than-life uncle “adopts” a teen musician, a runaway dreaming of greatness. The story of Sheryl’s growing attachment to Peter plays over a background of music, blossom and bees. Everyone works together in the orchards. The dog barks. Everyone relaxes together in the evenings. And Sheryl dreams.
A haunting sense of wrongness lies behind the countryside peace of Kelly Watt’s novel. Readers are drawn in as surely as young Peter, happy to belong and delighting in the author’s evocative prose. But something else is going on, and no-one's talking about it. As summer falls to September, the reader hunts for clues.
The truth is unexpected in this tale, as is the dog of the title. Good and evil, myth and madness, horror and beauty combine. And the story is one that will stick in the reader’s mind. A girl who knows too much. A friend who knows too little. And a truth too little told…
Disclosure: I was given a copy of this novel and I freely offer my honest review. I love it (and I’m terrified by it!)
This summer her larger-than-life uncle “adopts” a teen musician, a runaway dreaming of greatness. The story of Sheryl’s growing attachment to Peter plays over a background of music, blossom and bees. Everyone works together in the orchards. The dog barks. Everyone relaxes together in the evenings. And Sheryl dreams.
A haunting sense of wrongness lies behind the countryside peace of Kelly Watt’s novel. Readers are drawn in as surely as young Peter, happy to belong and delighting in the author’s evocative prose. But something else is going on, and no-one's talking about it. As summer falls to September, the reader hunts for clues.
The truth is unexpected in this tale, as is the dog of the title. Good and evil, myth and madness, horror and beauty combine. And the story is one that will stick in the reader’s mind. A girl who knows too much. A friend who knows too little. And a truth too little told…
Disclosure: I was given a copy of this novel and I freely offer my honest review. I love it (and I’m terrified by it!)
October 7, 2019
.Book is nostalgic. Takes you to country life in 1964. When we see setting and background in which it is set.
But it's theme is very dark.
Language is a bit heavy. Innovative at points. Quite introspection full at junctures and little tiring at few paragraphs.
Overall nice read to peek ibside dark corners of human psychology.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It's the summer of 1964 and the Supremes are the reigning queens of radio. Sheryl-Anne MacRae dreams of running away from her home on an apple orchard in southwestern Ontario to find her missing mother. But the teenager's plans are put on hold when her uncle and guardian, Fergus, the local pharmacist and an amateur photographer, brings home a handsome young hitchhiker.
When Sheryl-Anne meets the guitar-toting Peter Lucas Angelo, she falls in love. But life in Eden Valley is not as idyllic as it seems. As the summer progresses, Peter is pulled deeper into Fergus' dangerous underworld – a world of sex, drugs, pornography and apocalyptic visions.
Through the naïve eyes of the ethereal 14-year old Sheryl-Anne, Kelly Watt explores themes of child abuse and sexual deviance, and the secrets, dissociation and denial that allow it to flourish.
A gothic tale told in vivid, often hallucinogenic prose, Mad Dog was a 2001 Globe and Mail notable book and Watt's first novel. The book has been republished with a U.S. publisher (an updated edition).
But it's theme is very dark.
Language is a bit heavy. Innovative at points. Quite introspection full at junctures and little tiring at few paragraphs.
Overall nice read to peek ibside dark corners of human psychology.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It's the summer of 1964 and the Supremes are the reigning queens of radio. Sheryl-Anne MacRae dreams of running away from her home on an apple orchard in southwestern Ontario to find her missing mother. But the teenager's plans are put on hold when her uncle and guardian, Fergus, the local pharmacist and an amateur photographer, brings home a handsome young hitchhiker.
When Sheryl-Anne meets the guitar-toting Peter Lucas Angelo, she falls in love. But life in Eden Valley is not as idyllic as it seems. As the summer progresses, Peter is pulled deeper into Fergus' dangerous underworld – a world of sex, drugs, pornography and apocalyptic visions.
Through the naïve eyes of the ethereal 14-year old Sheryl-Anne, Kelly Watt explores themes of child abuse and sexual deviance, and the secrets, dissociation and denial that allow it to flourish.
A gothic tale told in vivid, often hallucinogenic prose, Mad Dog was a 2001 Globe and Mail notable book and Watt's first novel. The book has been republished with a U.S. publisher (an updated edition).
October 4, 2019
3.5 stars
RTC
RTC
July 17, 2023
This appears at first to be a mix of beautifully rendered landscape and life in an apple-growing region of Ontario. The main character is Sheryl, a fourteen year old girl having a summer of boredom and self-awareness and burgeoning sexuality–but also strange dreams and visions, that we gradually realize may have actually happened. For a long time appealing realism and interesting characters prevail, as the narrator's uncle Fergus picks up a handsome young hitchhiker, but the atmosphere is increasingly fraught and the realism begins to tremble with bad things just under the surface. It is, in the end, a well-rendered horror novel without any supernatural trappings.
Uncle Fergus, whose trajectory, along with Sheryl growing up, is the heart of the story, is attractive, insightful, and creative. He has a past as a depressive who can't hold a job, but has managed to become a newly minted pharmacist, only he is also a drug dealer–and is gradually revealed to be one of those terrible charismatic leaders along the lines of Jim Jones and David Koresh who fascinate and destroy. This is revealed to us very gradually by Sheryl, in whose point of view we are deeply embedded.
One of the most brilliant accomplishments of this novel is that Sheryl, in spite of the horrors and weirdness, is a thoroughly real barely-teenaged girl. She reads Nancy Drew mysteries that belonged to her disappeared mother and occasionally spies on the adults around her and their activities (you aren't supposed to talk about what happens in the night world during the day). She feeds the rabbits and the large vicious white mongrel whose hind legs don't work.
At the same time, she is part of certain sinister and terrifying rituals. All the time, she is a normal, slightly petulant fourteen year old who doesn't quite know if she wants to have sex with the slightly older James Dean lookalike hitchhiker or to hang out with her younger cousin and bike into town to spy on an old schizophrenic. Would Fergus's brothers and wife have followed him with such unquestioning enthusiasm? The search for an answer is part of the project of the novel: why do we get caught up irrationality? Who gets away from it, and who doesn't?
Uncle Fergus, whose trajectory, along with Sheryl growing up, is the heart of the story, is attractive, insightful, and creative. He has a past as a depressive who can't hold a job, but has managed to become a newly minted pharmacist, only he is also a drug dealer–and is gradually revealed to be one of those terrible charismatic leaders along the lines of Jim Jones and David Koresh who fascinate and destroy. This is revealed to us very gradually by Sheryl, in whose point of view we are deeply embedded.
One of the most brilliant accomplishments of this novel is that Sheryl, in spite of the horrors and weirdness, is a thoroughly real barely-teenaged girl. She reads Nancy Drew mysteries that belonged to her disappeared mother and occasionally spies on the adults around her and their activities (you aren't supposed to talk about what happens in the night world during the day). She feeds the rabbits and the large vicious white mongrel whose hind legs don't work.
At the same time, she is part of certain sinister and terrifying rituals. All the time, she is a normal, slightly petulant fourteen year old who doesn't quite know if she wants to have sex with the slightly older James Dean lookalike hitchhiker or to hang out with her younger cousin and bike into town to spy on an old schizophrenic. Would Fergus's brothers and wife have followed him with such unquestioning enthusiasm? The search for an answer is part of the project of the novel: why do we get caught up irrationality? Who gets away from it, and who doesn't?
October 17, 2019
Mad Dog is a darkly compelling story of a young woman growing up in Ontario deceptively-bucolic Ontario apple country. This is an excellent example of a book that blurs the lines between Young Adult and Adult fiction. A great read for fans of both! (Think "Son of A Trickster" by Eden Robinson).
March 12, 2020
review to come
October 4, 2019
I'm kind of torn on a 2 or 3 star, so I'm going to round up. The book was OK for me, and while I was reading it I was so confused and wondered what the heck am I even reading, but I couldn't stop because I just wanted to know where it was all going. In the end I was still just as confused but it's been a few days since I've finished it and.... I think I kind of get it? I guess that's kind of like abuse, really, right? Maybe at the time you don't really know or acknowledge what it is but with time and experience you can look back and clearly say, " that was definitely abuse "? I know this sounds fully confusing but this book was definitely different, but kind of in a good way. How's that for vague?? Ha!
April 6, 2009
What the crap was up with this book? I felt like I needed to scrub my brain after reading it. Talk about disturbing. A horse is tied up and slit open, a little girl is being shoved into the bleeding horses stomach (and by into, yes I mean actually INTO the horses gaping wound of a stomach, head first), a dog is beaten, a little boy who seems to enjoy torturing animals and skinning cats, not to mention the religious cult craziness. I.... wow, there are no words that can fully explain how disturbing this book is. It was definitely not what I was expecting at all. Very unsatisfying ending too. The only good thing about the book was actually being able to make it all the way through it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews