Yet Ms. Bakis has built her fantastical edifice on emotional bedrock. The dogs were conceived in loneliness. The inconstant devotion of my people is a pale substitute. The dogs enter Cleo's life after she is dumped by a lover, and they divert her from her grief. Although the novel addresses big themes, it is neither grim nor ponderous.
Parts are laugh-aloud funny.
In 2010, when the dogs break ground for a permanent settlement in Manhattan, it is still possible to satirize the indiscriminate way magazines like Vanity Fair worship any sort of notoriety, conflating the likes of a Richard Jewell or a Mark Fuhrman with movie stars. Cleo has a lot in common with Dunstan Ramsay, the drippy schoolmaster who narrates ''Fifth Business,'' the first volume in Davies's Deptford Trilogy. The Lyre of Orpheus,'' about the mounting of another vocal drama, whose libretto eerily mirrors the lives of its cast. But if ''Lives of the Monster Dogs'' owes a debt to an existing work, it may be to the Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's ''Heart of a Dog,'' published in 1925. In Bulgakov's novella, Russian doctors implant a human criminal's pituitary gland in a dog, who is transformed into a model Soviet citizen, except for his nagging itch to kill cats.