Fluke

A blinding flash of light and the world exploded into pain. After that the darkness, the warmth of his mother’s womb and the shock of birth. Then, slowly, colours and smells began to invade him, together with a constant hunger to be appeased and a growing awareness of the friendly-cruel giants who seemed to be in command.

He was a puppy. The men called him Fluke and the name was apt. After all it was by a fluke that he was different from other dogs, or from other creatures of the animal world with whom he had mental communication. Even Rumbo, who at least had a more than average canine understanding of the problems of survival in a man’s world, did not seem to want to know where he came from. Rumbo was a mongrel, what men might have called a petty criminal had they been able to read his mind. Perhaps he roped in Fluke as his accomplice in his raids on butchers and supermarkets because he dimly realised that the two of them had something in common.

But as the memories returned to him, Fluke knew that he was really alone. And he began to see what that thing was that singled him out from the rest of the dog world. A blinding flash of light and the world exploded into pain. After that the darkness, the warmth of his mother’s womb and the shock of birth. By some fluke he had been born as a dog. But whoever he had been and however he had died, Fluke was really a man, with a man’s intelligence and feelings, trapped inside the body of a dog, howling for vengeance.

FLUKE tells the humorous and startling adventures of a man who wakes one morning to find he has become a dog. A different kind of novel by an author whose novels, since his first, The Rats, have all been bestsellers.