Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly’s anonymous review of The Power of the Dog offered an unusually direct account of the novel’s concealed sexuality and its family conflict. Published on January 2, 1967, it acknowledged the brutality of the opening while identifying the repressed desire and calculated revenge that drive the story—elements that many other reviewers sidestepped.

Publication and Critical Context

The review appeared anonymously in Publishers Weekly on January 2, 1967. Its account stood out against much of the late-1960s reception: although other reviewers recognized the novel’s interior tragedy, they often recast it as a simpler struggle between good and evil, cruelty and kindness, or compulsion and intelligence. The Publishers Weekly reviewer was identified as the one contemporary critic who clearly understood and described the novel’s central sexual conflict.

The Review’s Reading of the Novel

The reviewer objected to the graphic brutality of the opening calf-castration scene, warning that it could put off many readers. The review then situated the story in Utah in 1924 and presented the conflict between two brothers: George, described as slow, clumsy, and essentially decent, and Phil, whom it identified as a repressed homosexual.

The review traced the consequences of George’s marriage to a widow and his bringing her to the ranch. Phil makes life intolerable for her, and she turns to secret drinking. When her bright, unconventional young son Peter comes to stay for the summer, he recognizes what is happening. The review also makes explicit the parallel schemes that sharpen the novel’s tension: Phil is plotting a sexual involvement with Peter, while Peter is preparing a chillingly clever revenge against Phil.

Assessment and Significance

The review’s candor distinguishes it from readings that reduced the book to a moral contest. It names Phil’s repressed sexuality as central to the plot and connects his harassment of George’s wife to Peter’s response, giving the family conflict a more specific and unsettling shape. Its description of the novel as combining Krafft-Ebing with a regional Western setting likewise emphasizes the collision of sexual psychology and ranch life.

At the same time, the reviewer’s response registers a tension between the book’s literary force and its likely market reception. It judged the novel to have strong literary appeal but less commercial appeal, linking that reservation to the graphic opening and the disturbing material that follows. In its contemporary critical context, the review remains notable both for its recognition of the novel’s governing conflict and for seeing how that very material might narrow its audience.