SOURCE: Filkins, Peter. “Fetch, Speak, Play Dead.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (4 April 1993): 7.

In the following review, Filkins maintains that “despite a flaw or two, Recital of the Dog is a novel as well-crafted as it is brutal, as obsessive as it is superbly controlled.”

“If you've never murdered a dog,” cautions the narrator of David Rabe's first novel, “or done any of the other things I've done … then you will have to believe that when these things happen, they happen the way I've said.” Such is the challenge the award-winning playwright poses for himself in Recital of the Dog, for in leading his reader through the gruesome world of a painter who goes mad after shooting a dog, the author must try to make enough sense out of the man's complete derangement to hold our attention, while also taking us on a convincing journey through madness, murder...