‘Moondogs’ mixes kidnapping, corruption, and comic-book heroics
Blind now and retired, the rooster hasn’t worn his cockfighting spur in years, but if a chicken is setting out on a criminal mission, he might as well don his hardware.
His name is Kelog, after the rooster on the corn flakes box, and he is the beloved sidekick of a bumbling bad guy named Ignacio. With the lethal metal blade gleaming on his leg, the bird is the bad guy’s secret weapon.
They are up to no good, these two, as is almost everyone else in Alexander Yates’s “Moondogs,’’ a debut novel that combines magical realism, geopolitics, and comic book-style superheroics with shoot-’em-up action, domestic drama, and daddy issues.
At the center of Yates’s tale, set in the Philippines circa 2004, is the kidnapping of a wealthy, widowed American businessman named Howard Bridgewater. A somewhat unsavory Chicagoan whose activities in Manila may not be entirely on the up-and-up, he gets into Ignacio’s cab one night and is abducted.
Unfortunately for Howard, no one raises an eyebrow at his absence — least of all his son, Benicio, who has flown into town on vacation and assumes that Howard’s failure to appear is yet another instance of his thoughtlessness. A self-righteous 20-something with a heart several sizes too small, Benicio has spent years nursing the wounded fury he feels toward his father. Only after Ignacio attempts, ineptly, to sell Howard to Muslim terrorists — thereby setting off law-enforcement alarm bells — does Benicio learn of the kidnapping and think to worry, slightly.
Yates went to high school in the Philippines and later worked at the US Embassy there, so it’s unsurprising that one strand of his novel belongs to the family of an embassy worker, Monique. The effort to save Howard takes place against a backdrop of Filipino anger at the United States during the Iraq War as well as a history of terrorism in the country.
The bad news about “Moondogs’’ is that Benicio, who works as a systems administrator at a high school, is the main character in a stuffed-to-the-gills ensemble. He is maddeningly banal for such a hefty responsibility, and Yates’s writing — often fizzy, funny, and tone-perfect elsewhere — acquires a stiltedness in the chapters focusing on him. (Also on the bad-news front, a heads-up to the skittish: The romping puppy who gets obliterated early in the book is one of numerous animals who die gruesome, sometimes lingeringly observed deaths.)
The good news is that the novel’s supporting cast can be highly entertaining, particularly the members of Task Force Ka-Pow, an elite unit of misfits with superpowers: Elvis, a shape-shifter; Lorenzo, a magician whose magic is real; Racha, whose body absorbs all of the violence aimed at the others; and Efrem, a sniper whose eyesight can bend around any horizon, and whose bullets can follow. Like a Filipino version of the Justice League, but much bloodier, they’re led by supercop Reynato Ocampo, whose exploits inspire the country’s favorite action films.
The movie star who plays Reynato on screen is a Schwarzeneggeresque actor-turned-senator. A friend of the kidnapped Howard, he gets political mileage out of his character’s populist slogan, “Stick up for the unstuck up for.’’
The sentiment seems to motivate, or justify, quite a few of the characters in “Moondogs.’’ Comically, Ignacio’s dimwitted brother and accomplice, Littleboy, is a huge Ocampo fan. More touchingly, so is Efrem, the sniper, who believes deeply in the honor those words demand and sees a father figure in Reynato.
“Moondogs’’ is uneven, frustratingly so because great chunks of the book are quite good. In many of his characters, Yates achieves an extraordinary synthesis of tenderness and brutality, making us question our own sympathies. Rare is the novel that makes a reader feel most of all for the sniper. Here’s one.
Laura Collins-Hughes is a member of the Globe staff and can be reached at lcollins-hughes @globe.com. 
