Tom Strelich - adventures of Hertell Daggett, the owner-operator of the Li’l Pal Pet Cemetery, who discovers a long-lost secret experiment dating from the Kennedy era buried deep below the graves. This novel will evoke a wide range of emotions, from outright laughter to shock, indignation and everything in between

 

Tom Strelich, Dog Logic, Owl Canyon Press, 2017

https://www.tomstrelich.com/doglogic

Hertell Daggett is not what he used to be: once married, once a physicist, and once shot in the head in a New Year’s accident, or possibly 4th of July, he could never remember -- the doctors got the bullet out, but a few specks of copper remained floating in his brain, connecting parts no longer connected in the rest of us, filaments going back to the beginning of time. Hertell remembers the yodeling of dinosaurs, the dry humor of mastodons, and the rubbery smell of trilobites. He’d once had a future, but now he lives on the outskirts of Bakersfield, a damaged caretaker of a failing pet cemetery.

Hertell discovers a time-capsule, actually more of a vast time-cavern full of people who’ve lived beneath the pet cemetery since 1963, part of a long-forgotten Government program to preserve Western civilization in the charred aftermath of the massive nuclear war triggered by JFK’s assassination – at least that’s what their computer simulation predicted.

Hertell becomes their shepherd and protector leading the duck-and-cover civilization into the astounding, mystifying, and often dismaying world that has wobbled on without them.

Like one of those lost tribes stumbling from the jungle into civilization, only this time it’s not the lost tribe overwhelmed by civilization, but very much the other way around.

"Dog Logic by Tom Strelich is rather like life, harrowing in places, funny in others, occasionally uplifting and sometimes unutterably sad... this novel will evoke a wide range of emotions, from outright laughter to shock, indignation and everything in between. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope to see more novels from Mr Strelich in the future - Readers' Favorite

"Strelich has the dramatist's gift for dialogue, the poet's feel for space and time, and a prophet's vision of history's currents and human folly. Dog Logic is a mordant romp on the fault lines of American progress, at the pace of a drive-in movie. Strelich is a first-class American fabulist." - Algernon D'Ammassa

"Dog Logic is a thinking person's novel with a hahah funny bone and a jazz musicians sense of going left when you expect to be going right. Mr Strelich is a true original." - Doug Warner

"... funny, clever, savvy and wildly unique. What takes place in the book will be memorable for a reader of the novel. It tells a tale that is special, cautionary, sometimes mind blowing, surprisingly emotional and current. There are a collection of unforgettable characters and experiences that make this a great ride." - Steven Woolf

"This book has everything a seasoned reader might desire: powerful, evocative characters worthy of Thomas McGuane, dialogue that is wise, wacky and wonderful, and a plot worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. This is a work for the ages-it is totally aware of where we've been, and it teases us with the mystery of where we might be going." - Dr. Robert Sanborn

"Smart as a whip and funny as hell -- Dog Logic is, firstoff, one of the most brilliant and entertaining books I've read in the last year, and I highly, highly recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor about their cultural unease. It's satirical, lyrical, touching, hilarious, and suspenseful at once." -- Amazon Customer Review

Dog Logic by Tom Strelich is rather like life, harrowing in places, funny in others, occasionally uplifting and sometimes unutterably sad. It concerns the life and adventures of Hertell Daggett, the owner-operator of the Li’l Pal Pet Cemetery, who discovers a long-lost secret experiment dating from the Kennedy era buried deep below the graves. Initial confusion, where the local police launch a raid on what they believe to be a drug production facility, is replaced by an increasingly manic scramble by a huge variety of government agencies to become involved. Hertell Daggett was once a top-flight physicist but, after accidentally being shot in the head, his thought processes follow their own independent paths - paths which do not necessarily merge with those of the many officials and organizations which have quite suddenly arrived on his land. When the President of the USA also becomes involved, things quickly start to spiral out of control to produce ever more dangerous, sometimes ludicrous scenarios and leading to an astounding denouement.

Dog Logic has its origins in the play of the same name by Tom Strelich and works very well as a book. The narrative moves at a steady pace introducing little nuggets of information at just the right times to keep one engaged. Hertell is a solid, well-drawn character whom you cannot help but like - you will find yourself siding with him and urging him on as he struggles against the forces of Big Government. Well written by a talented storyteller, this novel will evoke a wide range of emotions, from outright laughter to shock, indignation and everything in between. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope to see more novels from Mr Strelich in the future. - Charles Remington

Tom Strelich, Water Memory, 2022.

Dog Logic Sequel -- The earth's magnetic poles have reversed, and people are starting to forget things. Civilization has just had its clock reset to the great cosmic flashing 12:00am from almost a million years ago. And humanity, and everybody in it, has pretty much forgotten everything it learned since the last time. This novel tells the story of what happens after the end of Dog Logic and is due in 2022.

It’s the end of the world, and Hertell Daggett's new job is to save it. Well not save it so much, as just… Remember it. The earth’s magnetic poles reversed, and people are starting to forget things.

The poles have switched many times over the last few billion years, and it never made much difference to the blue-green algae and trilobites and dinosaurs that were running around eating each other all day back then. But the last reversal happened almost a million years ago, before civilization and culture, and alphabets and numbers, and money and God, and atom bombs and X-Box. So this time it’s different.

Civilization has just had its clock reset to the great cosmic flashing 12:00am from almost a million years ago, and humanity, and everybody in it, has pretty much forgotten everything it learned since the last time.

Everybody that is, except Hertell Daggett, who remembers pretty much everything.

Because he’d once been shot in the head in a celebratory New Year’s Eve accident. The doctors got most of the bullet out, but they missed a few tiny specks of copper that stayed behind, floating inside his brain, connecting him to all those things that everybody else on earth has forgotten.

And it falls on Hertell Daggett to start civilization all over again, and maybe even help get it right this time. Because sometimes all it takes is a single person who remembers history to change the course of it, sometimes by thought, sometimes by word, sometimes by deed, and sometimes by complete accident.  

Tom Strelich, Mustard Seed 1.0, 2023.

Dog Logic Prequel -- This novel tells the story of how the duck-and-cover Mustard Seed civilization came to live beneath Hertell’s Lil'Pal pet cemetery, what their lives were like in their underground world while our world raged on above their heads for over half a century, and how an accordion player would ultimately lead them to Hertell and our world above. This novel (in progress) tells the story of what happened before Dog Logic and is due in 2023.

It started as a classified whitepaper under Truman, advanced to a feasibility study under Eisenhower, and went on to become the most highly classified program under Kennedy, a top secret project to preserve a tiny seed of the human experiment in the event that it all went horribly wrong. In which ‘horribly wrong’ was determined by a computer simulation analyzing the current geopolitical state, defense posture, and domestic socioeconomic and political conditions and when all of the threshold Eigenvalues and 6-sigma standard deviations were exceeded on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Control Data 6600 announced that the end of the world was nigh, triggered the operational phase of project ‘Mustard Seed’, and then immediately erased all traces of itself.

The novel tells the story of how the duck-and-cover Mustard Seed civilization came to live beneath Hertell’s pet cemetery, what their lives were like while our world raged on above their heads for over half a century, and how an accordion player would ultimately lead them to Hertell and the world above. It tells the story of what happened before Dog Logic, the novel