Red Zone: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the San Francisco Dog Mauling by Aphrodite Jones

(William Morrow) $24.95

Aphrodite Jones is the Jerry Springer of "true crime" writing. She digs into the most luridly sensationalistic murders, and milks them for all the sleaze they are worth. Her new book, Red Zone, is about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago in which a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs. The dogs were Presa Canarios, a rare breed so large and ferocious as to make rottweilers seem like wimps in comparison. Their legal owner was a white supremacist prison inmate, in for life without parole, who was breeding them for sale as guard dogs in meth labs.

The dogs' actual caretakers were a married pair of lawyers, who raised the animals in their small San Francisco apartment. They used to gloat over how the dogs intimidated the neighbors, as well as over the size of the male dog's penis. The couple also legally adopted the inmate as their son. Under the guise of lawyer/client consultation, Mom, Dad, and Junior exchanged pornographic letters, photos, and drawings, in which they imagined themselves as noble Aryan warriors in a fantasy ménage à trois--or perhaps I should say ménage à cinq, since the dogs were also supposed to be involved. Actual bestiality was never proven, but Jones loves to hint and insinuate whenever she is short on concrete facts.

After the inevitable happens, and the dogs kill a neighbor in an unprovoked attack, the lawyers sink further and further into denial and delirium. They blame the victim for her own death, and claim that the dogs were as gentle as lambs. As Aphrodite Jones recounts all this, her writing can itself be described as delirious. She moves freely back and forth in time, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order, until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose combines the hyperboles of tabloid journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. On nearly every page, she writes sentences that take my breath away, they are so wonderfully off in both rhythm and meaning: "To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature"; "Noel's act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel's charming smile away."

Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose; my effort to emulate her style in this review has been a miserable failure.