[In the following review, Hutchings cites parallels between Recital of the Dog and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.]

Not since the Ancient Mariner wantonly shot the albatross has the more or less capricious killing of an animal touched off so bizarre and perverse a series of events as those that occur after the shooting of Barney the dog at the beginning of playwright David Rabe's first novel, Recital of the Dog. These repercussions become increasingly ominous for the book's first-person narrator, an artist who has withdrawn to the countryside with his wife and son in pursuit of rustic tranquillity: he is beset by hand tremors that prevent him from painting, a guilt-ridden obsession with the aged owner's futile search for the missing pet, and finally a compulsive attraction to the old man's fields, home, and life. Notwithstanding the summer's heat, the narrator dons an old worn greatcoat, a garment of contrition that seemingly becomes a shamanistic appurtenance as his tale unfolds.

In “Something Monstrous on the Loose,” the second (and most interesting) of the novel's four “books,” the protagonist becomes a literal surrogate for the old man's now-vanished dog. Through a series of steps that are savage, grotesque, and comic at the same time, he learns to behave and think like a dog, fetching newspapers and retrieving newly shot game in his teeth, snarling at strangers, and cravenly beseeching his master's approval and physical manifestations of affection. Through this process, he undergoes the age-old pattern of initiation that is familiar to readers of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade: isolation from family and community, enforced submission to and self-abasement before those in authority, endurance of rites that simultaneously degrade and instruct, and finally the acquisition of hard-won bodily-earned insight that remains secret from those who have not undergone the process themselves.

The third section, “The Moon Has Its Way,” advances the plot with a certain Cabinet of Dr. Caligari intensity, as increasingly hallucinogenic events are described with the convincing detail and compelling lucidity of the deranged—though also, at times, with their tiresome length as well. Perhaps, like Conrad's Marlow, Rabe's narrator has penetrated a “heart of darkness” in his own highly idiosyncratic version of an epic descent into hell, returning with the Campbell-style boon of (unfortunately inarticulable) knowledge that separates him from the rest of humankind. Or perhaps, like some of Poe's compulsive first-person narrators, he has simply gone utterly mad. Whatever the case, he recounts outrageously brutal actions—protectively kidnapping his son, committing acts of torturous and misogynistic violence, et cetera—which, mysteriously, seem to lack consequences in the “real” world.

“What could be believed? What was true? When was something known to be true?” asks a newly introduced character in “Angels,” the final section, intoning that “worlds could reside out there with occupants who might declare my ideas absolute or make them untenable, or impel me toward the invention of some new set of alternatives.” The epigraph to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner posited exactly that too, of course, but Rabe's prefatory quotations from Jung's Aion and Rilke's Duino Elegies provide more ostentatious clues, portentous and pretentious to almost the same degree.