[2] M. John Harrison of The Times Literary Supplement lauded the book as "compassionate without resorting to sentimentality, clever without losing its honesty, an undisguised novel of ideas which is also Ian McEwan's most human work."

His lapidary prose neatly disguises his search for transcendence.”[4] A reviewer for Publishers Weekly argued that for some the pivotal scene may be unconvincing because McEwan "is rather too didactic in the exposition of his theme”.

However, the reviewer also said the work remains "impressive; McEwan's meticulous prose, his shaping of his material to create suspense, and his adept use of specific settings [...] produce a haunting fable about the fragility of civilization, always threatened by the cruelty latent in humankind.”[5] Edward P. McBride of The Harvard Crimson praised McEwan's psychological insight and argued, “Black Dogs challenges us to confront the tension we all feel in the meeting of science and religion, the rational and the irrational.

McEwan crafts the work subtly, weaving the same uncertainty through prose and plot.”[6] In the London Review of Books, Graham Coster complained that the final section's authoritative account is inconsistent with the "relativistic collage of verdicts over the preceding pages", and also criticized certain climactic encounters for the novel's narrator as areas where "McEwan’s metaphysical inquiry shrinks to [...] a knowing wink of, You can’t rule it out, can you?"

But Coster also described the philosophical conflict between Bernard and June as a source of considerable pathos, and wrote that the author "shares Forster's sensitivity to landscape as a numinous protagonist [...] McEwan’s prose evokes [the menacing environment where June is attacked] with tender precision.”[7] In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani stated that "McEwan dexterously opens out his story onto a political and philosophical level" but skates briskly over these larger implications of the story after doing so.

[8][9] Amanda Craig wrote in the Literary Review that while Black Dogs had potential to be "a pleasing essay on the ambiguous nature of memory and desire, or the real and the ideal," it ultimately "gets lost in portentous [...] polemic."