Kinski

I'm a sucker for stories about dogs, especially dogs that are in bad situations. Kinski is a story about a man—Joe—who, while on a business trip, finds a stray dog. He goes very quickly from trying to find the owner to claiming it's his dog, but then animal control takes the dog to the shelter. After that, it's all about Joe's desire to get this dog back which eventually involves both theft and breaking and entering.Mingled with this is Joe meeting the owner of the dog—Holly—while they're staying at a hotel before the drive home. He finds out that she owns Kinski, who's actually named Bosley, and quickly gets out of there. She later picks him up and by this time has put two and two together and leaves his ass by the side of the road.Restitute, jobless, and with a newfound criminal record, Joe seems to slip into destitution, all due to a dog that was never his that he wanted for no reason that was explained. Yet, in the end, all books with a dog have something of a happy ending and Joe gets a phone call from a veterinarian's office in Mexico. He picks up the dog and apparently moves to North Bend—where he was at the beginning of the book.It was certainly a fast read, and I really enjoyed the black and white art. There are some great panels with the full-page panels being the best:The writing is sparse, but that seems to be intentional. It reminds me a lot of [b:The Road 6288 The Road Cormac McCarthy https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg 3355573] by [a:Cormac McCarthy 4178 Cormac McCarthy https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1414695980p2/4178.jpg] in that way. I wasn't a huge fan of the writing in The Road, and it didn't do much for me here either.I think my biggest problem with the book is Joe's motivation to get this dog. It only takes a few panels on three pages to go from “No collar, huh? Where are your people? We'll figure this out.” to “I found him. He's mine.” He's asked a few times about why he's doing this and it only ever comes down to feeling like the right thing to do. As a dog owner my gut would tell me to get this guy back to it's owners if everything about the dog looked alright. If the dog was injured, especially if it looked abused, that'd be another matter and one I hope animal control would notice. Yet, no matter how I spin it, I can't quite agree with what Joe did and that's why I didn't rate the book higher.