Puppy Love

This is my darling puppy girl, Daisy.

She lives at home with my family in Louisiana, so I miss her a lot while I'm away at school. :( Hello, my name is Meg, and I think of dogs as people. (Haha.) I have this voice my mom and close friends refer to as "the puppy voice"--my regular voice but an octave higher--that I immediately start using whenever someone mentions a dog. Also, whenever I am around a dog I behave somewhat in the way described in this xkcd comic, titled "Cat Proximity"--substitute "Dog" for "Cat" and imagine the little man as me.

Now, I am not usually a big fan of Stephen King. He's just very grotesque in his writing. I don't want to hear about all that blood and guts, all the gory details--I just don't. But seeing as I have no choice, I would say that I don't think Under the Dome was too bad. I was cringing, but there was a lot of other stuff going on, so it was okay.

But what really closed the book for me--what really made me happy--was not even necessarily the lifting of the Dome. Instead, it was the scene, on the next to last page at the bottom--starting with "Horace had seen her." Just looking over it again now makes my heart happy. In the end, woman is reunited with puppy dog, and all is well. Which brings me to my main point--I am extremely critical of books depending on how they treat dogs.

Part of me thinks that dogs have a special part in horror/dark fantastic/what-have-you books because they can play the roles of protectors--like the German shepherds in Heart-Shaped Box or, my favorite hero-dog of this novel, Audi (*sniff sniff*), who served her people and protected her children very well. I was, in the end, pleased with both Heart-Shaped Box and this book because the author didn't forget about the dog. 

--And believe me, "forgetting about the dog" does happen. One that sticks out in my mind, a book I love except for this detail--The Great Gatsby. There's a puppy at the apartment, and after they have their mint juleps and leave there's a big commotion and the book spirals to the end. But we never hear about the dog again. --Perhaps it's not literarily relevant, whatever, but to me, the dog is always relevant. I always want to know.

Some of the strongest emotions I feel in books are centered around dogs. When they put Gip down in The Little Stranger--and this is no joke--I had to stop reading and go cry and hug my dog (sweet Daisy, if you'll recall) before I could continue reading. I was afraid from the moment the guardian-dogs were introduced in Heart-Shaped Box because I knew they were going to die. And in Under the Dome, I tried to hurry through the part where the mob shot the German shepherd (I forget his name, poor puppy); I knew that something was going to happen to Audi; and for a while I forgot about Horace but whenever he was mentioned again I worried for him as the book progressed until the final sweet end. I don't feel the same emotions about other animals, be they horses or cats or whatever pets people happen to have.

So, hey--I may be the crazy dog lady (haha). But I am always particularly attentive to the canine protagonists of a story, and I appreciate when they get a happy ending.

And one more thing before I go--a sweet puppy girl sitting in the sunshine, falling asleep.

Aaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwww.