100 books like White Fang

You want heartwarming books about man’s best friend? You’ve come to the wrong place. Novels with dogs don’t have to be heart-warming. They can be quite strange, sinister or both.

Here’s a prime example: The Dogs of Babel, which starts as the heartbroken narrator discovers his artsy, Goth wife has fallen from a tree and died. There are plenty of clues that this was not an accident. But there are no witnesses, except for poor Lorelei the dog. What starts out as a heartbreaking account of grief then takes a sharp turn into the bizarre as the narrator tries to teach Lorelei to speak so he can reconstruct his wife’s last hours. It descends into a seething underground, complete with people operating on dogs’ vocal chords to make them speak. Have I mentioned my list isn’t heartwarming? Did I swipe elements of this novel for my book? You bet… show more.

A classic shocker. When I first read this book sometime around 50 years ago, I was shocked at how quickly the characters reverted to a primal state.

Now, that I’m older and wiser, I’m still shocked. I’m shocked at how easily the characters went primal, because I think that is a sad reality, that for most people, civility is a thin veil easily torn by the right circumstance.

This is really how the Disney film Old Yeller should have ended, with a rabid canine raising hell and ripping out throats. What a phenomenal book.

My first foray into the world of Stephen King. I loved it so much I tried to name my dog Cujo … but I was overruled. We settled on Otto cause it sounds sorta similar. But, again, I love this book for the same reason I love Who Goes There?—a beast is terrorizing people who are trapped and can’t flee. It’s a simple formula for monster-themed novels, but it gets me every single time. 

Every list should have a lost classic, and this is mine: The tale of Baxter, the full-fledged psycho bull terrier, with, again, extended passages from the dog’s point of view. The book opens with Baxter musing:

“What if some morning as the old woman stood at the head of the staircase she were suddenly to feel a weight thrusting against the back of her legs? What if she were to lunge forward, grasping at the air, striking her thin skull against the edge of a stair?”

Bad dog. Baxter then trots over to live with the young couple across the street. That doesn’t end so well either. Then he finds true love with a kid with as little capacity for love as Baxter, and suddenly Baxter is no longer the antagonist and … the novel comes full circle. Very dark and very funny in spots and, I hate to repeat… show more.

Speaking of ancient hell hounds, where does the myth of the demon dog – you know, black, huge, gnashing jaws ravenous for human flesh, glowing red eyes, the most famous example being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles—come from? Hell hounds pop up in legends and stories from all over the world: Cerberus from Greek mythology; almost every single European country including Garmr from Norse mythology and ye fierce blacke dogges of English folklore; all over Latin America; China; Japan; India; Arabia; Russia; even the United States.

This account of a demon dog stalking English churches in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I is the earliest account I’ve found in English. The full title is A straunge and terrible wunder wrought very late in the parish church of Bongay, a tovvn of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, namely the fourth of… show more.

Tarzan of the Apes is one of the first books to completely grab my attention and take me to another place. As a young reader, I lost hours on end exploring Africa with this man separated from all society. Mr. Burroughs has a way of storytelling easily followed and powerfully descriptive. The story is simple but compelling and easily accessible for early teens.

Have you ever been cold, in your bones cold? That’s what I felt reading Athabasca. Growing up in northern Utah, I thought I knew cold. Then Alistair MacLean introduced me to a true, icy, desperate cold. The atmosphere is so much a part of this story, it’s like a character. I’ll admit, this book challenged me as a young reader. It tends to plod along at glacial pace until the last third of the book, but that end is feverishly spectacular. This book is the first I read by this author and I rapidly devoured all his other titles.

I grew up on Air Force bases, and like most kids, I wanted to fly planes. Arthur Lee gave me the chance to not just fly, but to experience the thrilling life of a pilot during the first world war. His description of life for a fighter pilot in those early days of military aviation captured my heart. The way they lived and the realities they faced revealed on those pages I devoured without sleep. I couldn’t put it down.

This is one of those books you’re supposed to have read growing up, but I never did. Instead, I read it during the pandemic—and I loved it. While it’s definitely a product of its time, it still holds up a hundred years later. It moves at such a fast clip, and the unsentimental, often brutal tribulations of the sled dog Buck kept me glued to the page. The quality of the writing and richness of the Yukon world adds to the intense ‘how’s he going to get through this’ tension. Plus, as a dog person, it’s always great reading a story about a dog or from a dog’s perspective. This is both.

This is an old book, in the tradition made so popular by Jack London. There were a number of these ‘proud, free dog of the North’ type of books published, and they are all great reads, yet this one is in my opinion the finest of them. It never descends into mawkish sentiment, but tells Kazan’s story from his own viewpoint; there is little of the human world, and we get a glimpse of just how alien a wild animal is, how different from our own, more domestic companions. 

A tremendously exciting read, with not a dull page in it.