Though he's best known for his prize-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, English writer Mark Haddon is equally talented when it comes to short fiction.
In Dogs and Monsters, as in his first collection, The Pier Falls, Haddon has an affinity for updating Greek and other myths, with half these stories featuring that provenance. "The Mother's Story," a beautiful and tender description of maternal love, is a retelling of the tale of the Minotaur from the perspective of the queen. After she gives birth to a "mooncalf"--a child whose features combine those of a human and a bull--bizarre rumors circulate in the kingdom about his parentage. Her husband confines their son to an underground prison reported to contain an elaborate maze, while she devotes herself to surreptitiously supporting the boy in an attempt to give him a life that's as normal as possible. "D.O.G.Z" reimagines the story of Actaeon, a hunter who's turned into a stag after he witnesses the goddess Diana and her attendants bathing. As the collection's title suggests, it's one of multiple stories that feature canines in greater or lesser roles.
"The Quiet Limit of the World" updates the myth of handsome, youthful Tithonus, whose lover, Eos, goddess of dawn, asks her father, Zeus, to grant the man eternal life, neglecting to request that he enjoy eternal youth as well. But that longevity, which "leaches everything of meaning, of urgency," quickly becomes problematic and poignant, when the character (known as Kristof in Haddon's version), moves through what would be multiple lifetimes watching all those he has known pass away. "Time swallows them all," he reflects in his decrepit old age.
In "My Old School," Haddon demonstrates his ability to create appealing fiction independent of any mythic foundation. Its narrator reflects from a distance of more than 30 years on an incident in his English boarding school when he betrayed a confidence shared by one of his classmates. He experiences the consequences of that transgression during their school days, but fully realizes them only when he makes a casual decision to attend a class reunion in middle age.
Dogs and Monsters concludes with "St. Brides Bay," an elegiac story Haddon says is something of an homage to Virginia Woolf. In it, the narrator--mother of a daughter who is marrying another woman--reflects on her own long ago love for a woman named Lucy, as well as her mother's "life spent polishing the boot that stood on her own neck." It's yet another of the fine examples in this collection of Mark Haddon's empathy for the human condition. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: In eight well-crafted stories, Mark Haddon revisits several Greek myths as well as showcases equally creative original material.