Author Toby Barlow: White-collar werewolf

As his car rolled through an underpass in central Los Angeles, Toby Barlow, a high-flying advertising executive, saw a pack of 30 dogs tearing through the city. "They come out of the canyon into the city and take a couple of housedogs back with them every time," his companion explained. "It was incomprehensible, you were in the middle of the city and there were all these wild dogs," Barlow recalls. "This was meant to be a civilised place."

Ten years on, the pack, swelled by domestic dogs picked up as it scavenged through town, has inspired Barlow's début, Sharp Teeth, a gothic novel-in-verse about a pack of werewolves fighting a bloody turf war in downtown LA. Readers should not expect wolves howling beneath a full moon, however. This is a skewed take on an old legend. "The thing that bothered me about werewolf stories is that they tended to come with the whole full moon shtick and I don't know why people don't push that around more," Barlow explains about his decision to defy lycanthropic convention.

In Sharp Teeth he has definitely pushed the myth around. Though a twisted love story about a female werewolf and a dog catcher, without a full moon in sight, the dissonance between "civilised" city life and the ferocious lupine gangs ripping through the LA streets is a metaphor for the dislocation of the modern world. A world whose monsters, hidden deep within the id, too often escape to commit acts of savagery in war zones, city streets, homes and offices.

The book is the latest addition to the burgeoning Slipstream Fiction movement. Exemplified by the likes of Steven Hall's boldly imaginative Raw Shark Texts and Scarlett Thomas's mind-expanding The End of Mr. Y, this plays around with popular culture, especially horror and sci-fi. The authors owe as much for inspiration to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, as they do to Haruki Murakami and Mark Z Danielewski – though Barlow admits sheepishly: "As I was writing it, I kinda had to keep saying, why am I writing this? I am not into the supernatural and not a huge fan of poetry, and yet it just kind of kept going."

He is happy to sit alongside Hall and Thomas in challenging conventional ideals of "literature". "Literature needs people to keep playing with it and keep pushing it, especially in a time when we are all ADD-ed up and don't really have time to play with the Great Big Serious Novel."

What the werewolf myth offered Barlow was an opportunity to explore notions of society and how the genders interact. "I was definitely trying to explore different kinds of female characters' motivation around these men." The lead female, unnamed and newly emerged from an abusive relationship, is a complex woman coming to terms with her animal nature, determined to manage her own life and protect her lover from the half-world she inhabits. It is a refreshing portrayal of female sexual power. "She had an interesting role," Barlow adds. "I thought about her relationship and duality – about when someone is doing something dishonest for good reasons."

But why turn her into a dog? "Different eras have their own supernatural creatures," he says. "In an era of decadence, such as the Seventies and Eighties, vampires were popular. When things fall apart those mythical creatures become more animalistic. Werewolves are about uncertainty, and we live in uncertain times."

One strand of Sharp Teeth makes me wonder about the influence of the 40-year-old's day job. Based in New York, he is executive creative director of the giant JWT ad agency, whose clients include Ford, Shell and MTV. Given that he works in such a competitive environment I wonder whether that is why the theme of pack animals and the compromises made in corporate life attracted him.

It's a theme crystalised by a white-collar pack of werewolves led by Lark. Barlow's next comment implies I am right. "Lark was an interesting study of a leader and how a leader can lose his humanity and have to recover it," he explains dodging my question. "Initially he felt two-dimensional. He had to discover his own extra dimensions, because life had made him something more simple than he wanted to be." As he speaks his voice drops to a whisper. Later he admits it is hard juggling the day job with writing and promoting a book, and I leave convinced that he identifies with Lark more than he acknowledges.

The decision to set the book in LA rather than New York, his home town, was deliberate. The city is as vivid a character as any in the novel: a dark, divided self in which conflicting groups fight for supremacy. "I know LA pretty well," he says. "It's a pretty unreal city. There is a part in the book when the character Venable talks about the city not being organic, but violently wrought out of the earth. Also, LA was a better setting because the dogs run around in baking sunlight, which they would have a hard time doing in New York."

There's another reason why LA should host a story as hardboiled as Sharp Teeth. The pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler seeps through every page, an influence Barlow acknowledges. "I was playing around with some characters and the story almost started telling itself," he recalls. "So I kept on wanting to see where the characters would go. It was like pulp fiction that kept on boiling."

The need to drive the narrative along led to the decision to write verse rather than prose. He baulks at any suggestion it is poetry and cites the reaction of the poet Billy Collins, the US Poet Laureate. "I did an animated film for him and gave him the book to read. He handed it back and said, 'This ain't poetry.'" He is laughing as he tells the story, but there is a note of relief in his voice: he does not want readers alienated by any association with poetry.

In fact, the verse emphasises the rhythm of the language and enables readers to rip through its pages at a rapid pace. He is pleased to hear this. " As a little kid I was once washed away in a flood. I was carried away for a mile," the father of two recalls. "I wanted to have that same rush of being carried away with the story, but not rushed through the beauty or the ideas. Also when you read pulp fiction, you find yourself skimming through the last third of the book and not always reading to the end of the sentence. I wanted that feel. It cuts the fat out." It is a refreshing thing to hear in an age of bloated prose.

One of the most bizarre plot turns is a bridge tournament between werewolves – though they play in their human forms. "Bridge is a really fun game," he says. Maybe it is, but in a hard-boiled horror novel?

"I was always intrigued by the fact that there is a culture that is totally invisible," he explains. "There are 20,000 people playing bridge on Yahoo at any given moment and newspapers all have bridge columns, but you never hear anyone saying, 'Oh, I was playing bridge.' It's a really different tribe, and I was trying to express this idea of packs of people moving in ways you don't see." The image of bridge players as pack animals is amusing, though I am not convinced they would move through city streets with as much menace as the dogs tearing by Barlow's car in that LA underpass 10 years ago. *

The extract: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (William Heinemann £12.99)

"... The woman lying at Bone's feet is scared now, / Her eyes swimming wide and panicked... / she makes grunting noises through the tape / but it's not enough. // The missing man comes through the door and / his shopping bag full of milk and eggs / takes Ray's shotgun blast. / As the pack moves out, stepping / over the spilled groceries and blood, / the dogs pause to lap the yolk and white from the floor / then scamper to catch up to the pack. //It's bloody muscle work, Bone thinks, / it's not the way Lark would have done things... / But this is Ray's pack now. / Enough said."

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