Could there be - oh, surely not! - a barking dog somewhere in the Herbert West Series, written by one A. I’m betting the average reader would hardly notice these recurrent dogs (except as they are used in Slaughterhouse Five, where they are meant to be noticed).Įventually, an uneasy feeling crept into my ruminations. Side note: compiling this information is a lot easier now that ebooks can be searched for particular words or phrases. Kurt Vonnegut used it consciously as a kind of leitmotiv in Slaughterhouse Five. A 2010 article in Slate listed authors from James Joyce to Jodi Picoult who have put variations on this barking dog into their novels. I googled the phrase, wondering just how much of a cliche it could be. I recently read a review of a book I’m reading - Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven - taking the author to task for ending a scene with the “ultimate cliche” of a dog barking in the distance. Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog barked. The caption reads: Farmer Brown froze in his tracks the cows stared wide-eyed back at him. One of my favourites shows a couple of typical Larson cows discovered in the act of drawing a meat chart of a human figure. I’ m a big fan of Gary Larson’s Far Side and rue the day he stopped drawing those bizarre and wickedly funny cartoons. Our dog, Nelly the Newfoundland, at Genoa Bay in January 2019.