Dogs and Monsters

Starred review from August 19, 2024
Haddon (The Porpoise) draws on Greek mythology and science fiction for a potent collection of stories about human foibles and desires. In “The Mother’s Story,” a woman sticks up for her Minotaur son, who, far from being a monster, is a neurodivergent boy rejected by his princely father. “D.O.G.Z” begins with a retelling of the scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where mortal Actaeon encounters goddess Diana bathing, then swerves into an account of the progeny of Ovid’s 33 dogs. “The Quiet Limit of the World” riffs on the Greek myth of Tithonus, who was made immortal by the goddess Eos, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Haddon is wickedly good at gore, as when Actaeon is eviscerated by his dogs, or when, in “My Old School,” the protagonist watches impotently as a fellow student hangs himself. He also pulls off grand lyricism from the perspectives of superhumans and immortals such as Tithonus, who, while cared for in the present day by his Jamaican nurse, laments the futility of the human condition (“Their presumption at giving themselves names when there is so little difference between this one and the next”), and critiques the results of human ingenuity—the astrolabe, the steam engine, the watch (“the most ridiculous affectation, a kind of pretended ownership of that thing over which mortals have least control”). This is divine.

September 15, 2024
Haddon's (The Porpoise, 2019) newest short-fiction collection contains eight varied tales which reach from the ancient past to a dystopian present and share a loosely unifying theme of people's monstrousness to one another and to animals and the consequences, if any. The volume starts strong with a royal mother's account of her efforts to rescue her beloved disabled child from her despotic husband in a brilliant re-envisioning of the Greek minotaur myth in an Elizabethan-like setting. In 1976, cliquishness and bullying reach tragic heights at a British boys' boarding school. The nature of dogs, both trusting and vicious, takes center stage in a creative yet emotionally distressing story that metamorphoses while moving across centuries, beginning with the myth about the hunter Actaeon and the goddess Diana. Haddon's variation on the story of Tithonus, who is granted immortality but not agelessness by his divine lover, is an expansive, thought-provoking journey of adventure and continual loss, concluding in modern times. Some tales confuse more than enlighten, and the overall effect is somber, while the best stories offer elegant prose and astute insights into humanity.

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September 15, 2024
Timeless spins on classic Greek myths. These stories generally begin in media res, leaving the reader to puzzle along with the characters over just what's going on. The protagonist is often given no name, and the context and circumstances are unclear--as is the border between the natural and supernatural. Time itself is apparently an illusion, a construct. Can the narrator be trusted? The narrator's world? Yet through the accretion of detail the story begins to cohere, often in the manner of a fairy tale or parable, offering a moral that is both instructive and unsettling. "He is drifting a long way from the shore on some dark, interior sea," describes the plight of the protagonist of "The Quiet Limit of the World," one of the longest and most expansive tales, apparently covering centuries. Its epigraph invokes Tithonus, the human lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Her father (Zeus, presumably) has granted the protagonist immortality, though nobody mentioned eternal youth, so the protagonist is sentenced to wither away without end. "You are going to spend a long time with a very old man. Or you are going to leave him," the father says with a laugh. Many of the stories lack any sort of resolution, making them seem all the more existential. There's a sense that they exist outside of time, that they have been repeating themselves forever, and will continue to do so, even as the gods of classic myth have given way to science and technology (as in the experimental gene-editing facility of "The Wilderness"). "My Old School" is an outlier here, more a story of contemporary realism than recast myth, yet also offering a moral for its untrustworthy narrator. The author seems to be toying with the essence of storytelling, the way that it has persevered and sustained itself through the ages. "The decades spin past," he writes. "The blur of dragonfly wings." The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.

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December 20, 2024

Haddon's (The Pier Falls) latest book is a richly detailed and imaginative short story collection that ably recasts and modernizes both classic Greek mythology--the Minotaur tale in "The Mother's Story," for example--and familiar narratives such as H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, which inspired "The Wilderness." The short "D.O.G.Z" is a somewhat strange homage to canines that begins with the retelling of Actaeon, whose dogs tore him limb from limb after the goddess Diana turned him into a stag. Haddon concludes this story by cataloguing of dogs in literature, art, and history, particularly noting the story of Laika, the Russian dog who went into space. The story collection also contains some monstrous humans, like the ones encountered in "My Old School," a sad reflection on the pecking order in an all-boys' school. VERDICT A wonderfully entertaining assortment of grim and dystopic tales that demonstrate Haddon's tremendous skills and versatility as a storyteller. (The novelist, poet, screenwriter, and children's book author and illustrator is best known for his award-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.)--Faye A. Chadwell

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