Lives of the Monster Dogs incongruously combines wild improbabilities with unusual precision about dates and documentation. The novel has two narrators, both historians. Ludwig von Sacher is writing a biography of Augustus Rank. He meticulously weighs the evidence found in Rank's sometimes fragmentary records, which (rather improbably) the monster dogs have transported throughout their long trek from northern Canada to New York City. Cleo Pirra, supposed author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, is a twenty-one-year-old history major when she first meets Ludwig. For six years after the catastrophe that destroyed all of the dogs except for Lydia, Cleo works on her book, alternating accounts of her own memories of the dogs with excerpts from Ludwig's journal, his letters to Cleo, Ludwig's biography of Rank, Rank's diary, newspaper articles by Cleo and others, and the complete libretto of Mops Hacker: The Opera. Besides buttressing their conclusions with excerpts...