Stray Dogs
Richard John Parfitt spent his teenage years living in Toronto, having emigrated with his family from the urban South Wales sprawl into which he was born. An ‘out of the frying pan into the deep-fat fryer’ trade-off that led to him dropping out of school, running errands for local hustlers, hawking junk remaindered dictionaries, and witnessing Bowie perform live as the Thin White Duke. Experiences that first planted the (demon) seeds for Stray Dogs, a hard-bitten debut novel steeped in the greasy meat of the city’s downtown Sin Strip at the tail-end of the 1970s. A menacing bygone shadow-world of titty-bars, obscene phone calls, and pissing in the street.
Craig Austin reviews Stray Dogs by Richard John Parfitt.