Interview with Tom Strelich, Author of Dog Logic

What’s the story behind the story? What inspired you to write Dog Logic (The Dog Logic Triptych Book 1)?

The novel is based on a play I’d written. The play had successful productions in New York and LA and won a Kennedy Center award, and that was great, but sometimes, as a writer, you create a character so interesting that you want to take them on a new adventure. I had a character like that with Hertell Daggett, the lead in Dog Logic, the play. I wanted to take him on a new adventure, a more epic one than I ever could in a play, given the practical and production limitations of live theatre. So I combined elements of the play, the setting, and characters, with a whole new story: the discovery of a duck-and-cover civilization. From there, I went epic and made it a satire, since that’s the perfect literary platform. It allows both writer and reader to explore the landscape of the human experiment—the absurdity, the grandeur, the mystery, the horror—not with a sermon or a polemic or a sigh, but with a laugh and a nodding smile of recognition.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of Dog Logic (The Dog Logic Triptych Book 1), what would they be?

I not only have a theme song for the main characters, I’ve got one for the whole triptych—trilogy is so overused, and I’m a big Hieronymus Bosch fan anyway. It’s this really weird instrumental cover of It’s a Wonderful World, only played on a Theremin, that I found on Archive.org. I ended up using it in the audiobook to open and close each chapter. It was perfect for the tone of the book—familiar and recognizable, but just a little off-axis.

What’s your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

This will sound strange, but I don’t really read fiction (though I did read Moby Dick a few years ago, just to say that I had). I mostly stick to non-fiction—history for the most part, with a little philosophy for garnish—but I also dip into UFO and paranormal stuff (which might actually be fiction, depending on how you look at it).

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

I inherited the 8-volume Will and Ariel Durant Story of Civilization set, and I’m in The Life of Greece now—with only six more to go.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

It was a scene I used for the audiobook sample, the portion Amazon and Audible let you listen to for free before buying the audiobook. It’s between the main character, Hertell, and his dad, who is quite old, on meds, and basically delusional. He’s telling Hertell that there are a bunch of people, almost a thousand, living underneath the pet cemetery, and how he saw the aliens from the Roswell flying saucer crash, and what the aliens looked like (beef jerky, only with big eyes). It perfectly captured not only the weirdness but also the humanity of the book.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

Yes, it’s a trick I’ve used since I was a playwright. I intentionally write myself into a corner so that the reader (or audience member) wonders, “How does he get out of this?” It forces me to come up with something, a twist, an unexpected turn, to send the story in an unpredictable direction and avoid the tar pits of predictability.

Do you have a motto, quote, or philosophy you live by?

Yes, I do, and it is… fiction slightly askew, because you can’t make up stuff any weirder than it really is. Stories happen in a real world just like ours—only a little bit off to the side and tilted at an odd angle.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

That dystopian future they always warned us about? It turns out we’re already living in it, so much to mock, so little time.

Tom Strelich is the author of the new book Dog Logic (The Dog Logic Triptych Book 1)

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