SOURCE: Swartley, Ariel. “Fissures under the Crust.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (20 December 1992): 3-4.

In the following review, Swartley presents a plot synopsis of Black Dogs, asserting that the character portraits of Bernard and June Tremaine and the attack on June by a pair of feral dogs both reflect McEwan's penchant for examining humanity.

The anticipatory chill begins with the title, Black Dogs. Fans of Ian McEwan's fiction know better than to envision cuddly house pets. Hounds of the general size and ferocity of the Baskerville beasts would be more likely. In four previous novels and two short-story collections, the 44-year-old Briton has proven himself to be a master of menace, an excavator of the jagged fissures that lie just under civilization's crust. McEwan's menaces often take the form of actual dismemberment and sexual perversity. The civilization is all in his prose: an eminently British combination of lucid...