If you were a bookish teenager in the late 1990s, the odds are good that “Lives of the Monster Dogs,” Kirsten Bakis’s first novel, arrived in your life like a spirit visitation. I remember it staring out at me from the fiction shelves at a Seattle bookstore, not long after it was published in 1997, cover-forward among a thicket of variegated spines. And what a cover it was, a faded photograph of a dignified malamute standing, presumably, on his hind legs, his body sheathed in an antiquated silk smoking jacket, cravat at the collar, one paw — or was it a hand? — balanced rakishly on a cane. Staring into his eyes, you couldn’t not pick it up; picking it up, you couldn’t not read it; reading it, you never forgot it.
The story Bakis told — one that unfolded in the style of “Frankenstein” or “Dracula,” through a patchwork of diary entries, magazine articles, letters and even a lengthy opera libretto — was as melancholy as it was beguiling: A Prussian mad scientist in the 19th century sets out to create a race of perfect canine soldiers for the kaiser, and his followers spend decades completing his work in isolation after his death. When their plans at last come to fruition, the otherwise genteel canines turn on their masters and eventually make their way to 21st-century New York City, where a human woman named Cleo Pira lovingly documents their follies and their fall.
1997 was a formidable year in publishing. As Jeff VanderMeer noted in his introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of “Monster Dogs,” Bakis’s debut was competing for attention with Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” as well as canonical doorstops like Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” and Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon.” Even in that company, “Monster Dogs” clearly marked the arrival of a major talent, a writer of prodigious commitment, capability and imagination. It was a book you spoke about in whispers, less out of cultish secrecy than awe in the face of a sui generis classic.
Advertisement
And yet, Bakis herself remained largely silent in the decades that followed, publishing almost nothing. If you loved the book, you might occasionally wonder what had happened to its author, but mostly you just kept talking about what she had written. Pete Simon, the editor in chief of Liveright Publishing, found himself doing just that in 2022 while in a meeting with the agent Lynn Nesbit, when he recalled reading “Monster Dogs” for a book club in the late ’90s. “She just lit up,” Simon told me. “She was like, I have something to show you.”
That something was an early draft of “King Nyx,” Bakis’s second novel — or, at least, the second that she will have published when it makes its way into bookstores at the end of February.
If “Monster Dogs” is a descendant of 19th-century horror, “King Nyx” is a close cousin of feminist gothic stories in the key of “Wuthering Heights.” During the 1918 flu pandemic, the writer Charles Fort — a real-life notorious researcher of paranormal and unexplained phenomena — and his wife, Anna Filing Fort, make their way to the secluded island of an obscenely rich and possibly mad industrial magnate who has promised Charles the freedom to finish his book. There, they encounter a strange series of circumstances — mysterious girls who lurk at the edges of the orchards, rumors of murder, humanoid automatons — that sometimes seems to have been designed for Anna’s benefit alone.
“King Nyx” is a book that understands that the crumbling mansions of gothic fiction merely materialize the minds of their female protagonists. It also understands that they must understand this fact, too, if they are to reclaim what is properly theirs. Or, as Bakis put it to me when I made my way to see her in New York’s Hudson Valley on a snowy day last month, it is about finding your voice again when it has been taken from you — perhaps as much by circumstance as by malice.
In this regard, if in almost no other, “King Nyx” reads almost autobiographically. “I kind of lost my voice,” Bakis told me. And so, too, she said, did her version of Anna, who in the novel has sacrificed something of her “inner compass voice” to carry on living.
Whereas Bakis wrote much of “Monster Dogs” in a Lower Manhattan apartment above an Irish bar, she has lived since 2010 in Croton-on-Hudson, a village about an hour’s drive from the city. (This is the other, smaller way in which the novel is almost autobiographical: The older Anna who narrates the novel lives on a farm just outside Croton.) As we drove to lunch, she gestured to the rented two-family home where she lives with her children — 18-year-old Theo and 15-year-old Charlotte, her new novel’s dedicatees — as well as one dog, two cats and four chickens.
“I don’t want to think of myself as blocked,” she told me. “I wasn’t stuck, in that I was writing, but I was stuck in that I couldn’t get to the heart of it.”
Advertisement
Bakis speaks deliberately, often pausing after every few words, as if composing a sentence instead of merely letting it sprawl forth. Later, she would characterize this as a product of nervousness, but I took it to be of a piece with her desire to get things right. Or to “get to the heart of the thing,” as she kept saying in one way or another.
She has attentive, busy eyes set in a calm face, and sports the heavy, turquoise-framed glasses of a considerate librarian. On the day we spent together, she was wearing an unassuming zippered sweatshirt and a coat that seemed almost too light for the afternoon freeze. The filmmaker Chris Wedge — who spent years working on an adaptation of “Lives of the Monster Dogs” that he was never able to produce — describes her in an admiring spirit: “Walking down the street, you wouldn’t know that she was carrying these kinds of worlds inside her. She doesn’t come across with any of the affectations you’d expect,” he said. “When I knew her, her kids were young, and she seemed like a mom who was doing what she could.”
At a restaurant called 105 Twenty Bar & Grill, Bakis and I ate surprisingly excellent polenta-and-quinoa burgers; she used a knife and fork, treating it like an open-face sandwich. She’s been a vegetarian since she was 11, when a babysitter told her that it was the right thing to do if you loved animals, which she did, very much. “I was not scared of any animal,” she said. “I just wanted to run up and hug every animal that I saw. It’s so native to who I am.”
She hasn’t eaten meat in the 45 years since, with one exception. A neighbor was slaughtering some turkeys he’d raised, and she volunteered to help, wanting to give them a clean death. She recalls picking up the 40-pound birds from behind, hugging their wings in place with her arms while the farmer cut their throats. “The guy who raised them was like, Oh, this vegetarian is going to run crying out of the room,” she recalled, laughing. “Well, guess who ran crying out of the room? It wasn’t me.” And yet, she still felt it, “felt the weight of taking their life. To be so close and to feel them fighting and dying. So I ate some.”
But never since, and never again. Today, the birds she lives with are retired laying hens, rescued from a farming system that typically gives up on fowl when they’re just 2 or 3 years old, even though they can live into their teens. At one point while we were talking, one of her kids called and a busy clucking noise emerged from her bag — she had recorded the chatter of her chickens in the yard and made it her ringtone.
“Monster Dogs,” too, had emerged out of her love for animals, germinating from a question she’d asked herself for most of her life: “What if my dog could talk?” Bakis was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when she sold the novel, in the 1990s. The short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg, who was then a teacher at the workshop, was one of the book’s first readers, and she recalls being “flabbergasted” by its excellence. “It is enchanted,” she told me. “I mean, it is enchanting, but there’s also something sort of enchanting and enchanted about the book. It floats into you; it floats around you. The depth of feeling is so intense.” Wedge shared similar feelings about his first contact with it, telling me, “It’s a beautiful, romantic tragedy. I felt consumed by it.”
Advertisement
The book’s successes — the positive reviews, the award nominations, the interest from Hollywood — were ultimately overwhelming for Bakis. “It’s weird to say this, but I was kind of a little traumatized by it, which I feel bad for saying, because I was so fortunate. I always recognize that,” she said. She recalled being backstage at an event with Ann Patchett when they were both in the running for the Orange Prize for Fiction. “I always remember her saying, Yeah, I’m a workhorse; this is part of the job,” Bakis said. “I was like, Next time, I’m going to have that attitude.”
But next time just … didn’t come, though not for want of effort. “I don’t know whether to be proud of this or embarrassed by this, but I never stopped writing,” she said. “I pretty much wrote every day, all that time.” But she wasn’t satisfied with what she was producing. “Monster Dogs,” which had taken her seven years, may have been acclaimed, but it hadn’t made her rich, and around 2004, when she was pregnant with Theo, she sold a second book out of financial panic. She worked on it for years in dialogue with her editor, Jonathan Galassi, who also edited “Monster Dogs” and whom she describes as unfailingly supportive. “I finished it three times, but it was just dead,” she said. “They wanted to publish it. They were like: Just do these couple more things. Just fix this and this. But the patient was dead.” She abandoned it for good in 2009, right around the time she gave birth to Charlotte.
The day after I visited, Bakis sent me an email, reflecting on her lost book. “I don’t know if I mentioned everything else I was doing while I was working on it: for example, for some of the time, I had a baby, a toddler who was having challenges, three dogs, and we were broke so I was cooking all our meals and baking our bread too. I’d sit up writing after the kids were asleep, cutting into my already short sleep time. It was a level of exhaustion that’s hard to even describe,” she wrote. “A life that contains different kinds of work, instead of one straight career trajectory, is a rich life.”
Still, she made progress on other novels in the years after and tried her hand at other projects, including some screenplays. But nothing quite came of any of it. There was still no pulse to her projects, not until she started “King Nyx” in 2020. Though it is not a pandemic novel, the traces of that year’s isolated days crop up here and there — as they do, for example, when a gas-masked chauffeur ferries the Forts to a secluded cabin, where they are forced to quarantine before they can meet their benefactor. She wrote the book — and has continued to write since — standing up at the kitchen counter. She likes it there because she can see the chickens pecking about in the backyard while also remaining attentive to the movements of her children, which she couldn’t be if she were locked away in her room.
After lunch, we decamped to the Black Cow, a coffee shop around the corner with an attached bookstore. Around 3 p.m., teenagers spilled in, fresh out of school. As we were chatting about the turkeys she had helped kill, three of the kids approached our table, and one tapped her on the shoulder. It was her daughter, Charlotte, and two of her friends, and for a while, Charlotte and Bakis bantered amiably in the way that mothers and daughters do — mostly phatic, but no less loving for it. “I just want to buy a house for my kids,” Bakis told me after Charlotte departed and the Black Cow emptied out again.
Advertisement
For a while after she moved to Croton, Bakis taught writing workshops in the Black Cow, though she had to schedule them around the times and days when the shop’s roaster and grinders were noisiest. She cobbled together a lot of work in the decades between her novels, mostly teaching and freelance editing, the latter typically for people trying to finish novels of their own. In passing, she mentioned that she actually lost income the year she finalized “King Nyx,” since it had taken time away from the other, more immediately lucrative services she provided.
She might not have written “King Nyx” if it hadn’t been for her teaching and editing. “I partly taught myself to come back to writing by seeing other people struggling with the same things I was,” she said. “When you see someone else doing it, you’re like, Oh, you can fix it like this. I would kind of take that back and apply it to myself.”
I got a sense of what it might be like to learn from Bakis when we were driving through town and she started eagerly peppering me with questions about my own perpetually-in-progress novel. When I told her that I knew the beginnings of my story but not where I wanted it to go, she enthusiastically quoted a phrase of E.L. Doctorow’s, about writing being like driving a car at night, such that “you can only see as far as your headlights.”
“Lives of the Monster Dogs” was a big, important book, at least in Bakis’s life, and it took her decades to get out from under its shadow. It is no spoiler to say that Cleo, the book’s protagonist, spends her later life wondering if her youthful days with the dogs were the most important thing that ever happened to her. In some ways, Bakis said, it was a little like that for her, though “not really, because I had a very full life. I wasn’t sitting there with a bottle of whiskey looking out the window.”
When she dropped me off at the train station, I asked her one more time about her hopes for “King Nyx” and what it felt like to finally have a follow-up to “Monster Dogs.” She told me that although she’s always grateful when people tell her how much they love her first book, she hasn’t even read it since it came out. She wants the new one to be a success, of course, and I’d argue that it very much deserves to be. Mostly, though, she’s eager not to simply be “Kirsten Bakis, the author of ‘Lives of the Monster Dogs’” anymore. That was the person she’d become right around the time she turned 30. All this time later, she said, “I really want to be a working writer.”
Earlier in the afternoon, we had stopped by the New Croton Dam, a dauntingly massive structure on the edge of town that was finished in the early 20th century. Dams resemble barriers, and they are, but what really matters about them is the water they ultimately cannot contain, whether by accident or design. Bakis, working writer, walked through the snow toward the base of the terraced spillway, where once-restrained water rushed down in torrential sheets, past tree branches bowed by scabbards of ice. As she turned her back to it, I stared up at the hand-hewn stones above, but really I was watching her as she looked out toward the landscape beyond, through which the descending current cut streams into the frozen ground. Little capillaries branching out, pulsing with stories from the heart of the thing.
correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Bakis's daughter, Charlotte. She is 15, not 14.
King Nyx
By Kirsten Bakis
Liveright. 306 pp. $28.99
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYml8cX6Oam1oo5mnwLWxzWaZmqOZqHqstc2gZKexqGK6sLrSrZyrZZSktLR5z6umn6Gcmnw%3D