Dogs and Monsters

Although there wasn't a digital copy available, I settled for the hard copy borrowed from the library. I had to read Mark Haddon's new collection of eight short stories in 'Dogs and Monsters' (August 2024). 

In this fictional universe, a few dogs appear, and a wolf, they are the Gods. Not all the stories are new. Some have been released as a short story in various journals. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

He re-tells three classical myths in the three stories — the opening story of this book, 'The Mother's Story' (Thesus and the Minotaur), and second last story, 'The Quiet Limit of the World' (Tithonus and Eos/Aurora). In between we have 'D.O.G.Z' (Diana/Artemis and Actaeon).

'The Mother's Story' loosely uses the idea of 'Minotaur' in a maze. The writer altered the story to mostly criticize tyrannical rulers, despots and fools. There's no monster in this labyrinth. It tells of a mother's love for her mooncalf-son Paul who was born not quite like other human boys. I'm glad that this story has a happy ending, and all the evil people got the deaths they deserved. 

More often than not, I close the covers or walk away and stand, perhaps, as I'm standing now, in the wood and brick doorway of the almshouse and remind myself that we can trust only that which we can touch with our own hands and see with our own eyes. It is shortly after dawn in spring and I am old and Paul is a grown man yet remains a child. He is crouching in the wet grass in a ragged nightshirt awaiting to play with the fox cubs who were born several weeks ago in the dirty, compost-warmed gap behind the glasshouse. I step back inside the hallway and pull the door half-across so that I am harder to see and smell. And here they come, all four of them, tumbling and big-pawed, thrilled by the world, springing into the air to pounce on earwigs and butterflies and their own tails. Paul extends his hand and they lick it. From the mouth of the makeshift lair, their mother watches, attentive but wholly unafraid. 

The second story 'The Bunker' was written and published in 2017. That was an odd little ghost story of hauntings of humans in this world, but it felt a tad sci-fi to me, of Nadine being pulled into a parallel dimension rather than being haunted by ghosts of a war long past. It could have done better with a few more paragraphs instead of leaving readers to guess between the lines. Some stories ought to be fleshed out a little more instead of dancing between vagueness and ambiguity. 

The last story in the book is 'St Brides Bay', which was also earlier published in 2017 by Hogarth Press along with Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall' in a new edition of 'Two Stories' (June 2017). Mark Haddon is a fan of Virginia Woolf's work, so I guess it makes sense to include this story in this collection. It simply lends us a view of an elderly woman Carol's life now and what goes on in her family and her circle of friends as she attended the wedding of her daughter Nikki (Nicole) to her partner Samantha in a church at St Brides Bay. 

St Brides Bay is an actual location in west Pembrokeshire, southwest Wales. The little inn that the wedding couple Samantha and Nikki stayed at, is Little Haven, which is an old fishing village in a conservation area, part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

This too was an actual world. You had to tell yourself that every day. With a breathable atmosphere and butterflies and thunderheads and yew trees so old that Roman soldiers had rested in their shade.

She would get up at eight and head down to the hotel for breakfast with Joe. She would order scrambled eggs on toast and a strong black coffee. They would talk about Tracey, they would talk about the baby, her first granddaughter. She held the rug to her chest and made her way back towards the lights of the house.