At the borders of fear and wildness

Wild Dogs
By Helen Humphreys
Norton, 185 pp., $22.95

Helen Humphreys's new novel begins with a startlingly original conceit: Six people living on the edge of a woods in Canada have lost their dogs to a wild pack. Each night, they wait in hope that their beloved pets will return to them.

Throughout this slender novel, Humphreys's fourth, one finds intensely serious and often beautiful language. But the novel's tone immediately belies a world of terrible loneliness as well as isolation. Her six characters feel removed from civilization emotionally and geographically, as if their physical isolation has penetrated their hearts, has made them removed not just from the world, but from each other.

The characters include Walter, an older man who lives off charity in his daughter's basement; Jamie, a teenage hoodlum abused by an alcoholic stepfather; Malcolm, a middle-aged, somewhat creepy loner; Lily, a brain-damaged young woman who soon disappears, and who, the others fear, has joined the feral pack. Finally, there's Rachel, an aloof wolf biologist, and Alice, the main narrator.

As the novel opens, Alice has just left her boyfriend and taken up residence in a cottage on Malcolm's farm. Soon, she will meet and fall in love with Rachel, who will just as quickly jilt her. This event, and Lily's disappearance, compose the novel's plot.

But ''Wild Dogs" wasn't meant to be about external plot so much as internal movement. Alice's jilting, the human parallel to the dogs' disappearance, provides a strong narrative drive. In her pain, Alice seeks to understand human nature, and this inquiry lends the novel an almost essay-like quality: ''To be wild is to live by instinct and not by imagination. To live wild is to have no story for it," she writes. Alice's attempt to make sense of what has happened to her, to create a story to explain the unexplainable, is a familiar and reassuring act of civilization.

But this same ruminative quality, especially when Alice speaks directly to her former lover, makes the reader feel voyeuristic, like Malcolm when he spies on Alice and Rachel and hears Alice say: ''Losing you has been so painful because being with you was so joyful. I never expected to feel that connected to someone, and I never expected to have it taken away so swiftly and completely."

Isolation -- between characters, between characters and reader -- seems to have crept into the novel's very bones, its narrative structure. Problematic as Alice's voice is, even more so is Humphreys's shift away from Alice to other points of view. Once we leave Alice and hear from the others, we realize that the story has come to an end and that the rest of the novel will be a retelling of it by characters whom we haven't known long enough to care very much about. Sadly, by the time we return to Alice in the final chapter, we have lost some of our investment in what happens to her. Thus, the resolution of the story -- excellent in theory -- does not feel as rewarding as it might have been.

Toward the end of the novel, Rachel, happily alone once more, questions people's fear of wolves: ''But what is this fear, really? Is it not that we are afraid of what is wild within ourselves? Isn't the whole structure of society about trying to fit ourselves into smaller and smaller cages?"

Unfortunately, this ''wildness within ourselves" isn't something Humphreys mirrors sufficiently in her characters. Apart from Lily's running off (the story's central event, but one too outlandish to be moving), there's nothing very wild about any of these people. Even Rachel, the standoffish scientist who leaves Alice, comes across as more self-involved and antisocial than wanton. Thus, the wild dogs remain essentially a literary conceit, rather than something that springboards us into a deeper understanding of the characters and their actions.

Still, the world Humphreys describes in ''Wild Dogs" is haunting. It touches upon fears about what we can't control, plays upon our innate sense that no living thing can be fully trusted. Our truest natures, Humphreys suggests, may not be guided by any moral or even social compass.

Humphreys's novel is atmospheric, but it's not an atmosphere we want to inhabit for long. Not because it's too wild, but because it's too cold. Intrigued as the mind is, the heart says: Get me back to the heat of civilization.

Jodi Daynard teaches creative writing at Emerson College.