Dogs and Monsters: Stories
“Dogs and Monsters is, in spite of the pain it brings, a magnificent book.”
Mark Haddon is a prolific author for both children and adults. He’s published novels, books of poetry, and a play, yet somehow Dogs and Monsters is his first short story collection. Yet the impression this book leaves is not that Haddon thinks of the short story as an afterthought. Rather, he crafts them with such care that a multi-decade career has generated just eight beautiful, carefully-constructed stories, each haunting enough to stand on its own.
Not every story in the collection takes up Greek mythology, but many do. It’s a popular area for revisionist fiction these days. Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy sit near the top of a mountain of books, each revisiting some Classical figure for modern sensibilities. Haddon sets his work apart by acknowledging that not every story needs to be a novel, and that justice can be done in a shorter form.
Haddon suggests that the agony of Pasiphaë, mother of the Minotaur, needs depth rather than drawing out. Simply titled “The Mother’s Story,” Pasiphaë’s account never names her. She struggles with a brutal husband and rumors of her own bestiality (unfounded, in this case) in Renaissance Europe rather than ancient Crete. Her experiences, wound inextricable with those of Daedalus and Icarus (names rather better known, but like hers, not included) expose how stories of magic may be used to distract from the simpler monstrousness of empathy’s absence.
“D.O.G.Z.” revises Actaeon’s encounter with Artemis and subsequent death at the teeth of his own hounds into a longer and deeply thoughtful consideration of the human-canine relationship. Haddon’s breakout novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime established his ability to examine with maybe a too-cool eye the suffering that emerges from two species intimacy. “D.O.G.Z.” brings back some that that emotion, dog by dog, over centuries and millennia (never, thank heavens, going as brutally into the question as André Alexis’ masterful but agonizing Fifteen Dogs).
“The Quiet Limit of the World” unites the myth of Tithonus with Tennyson’s poem of the same name (from which the title is drawn). Tithonus is given eternal life without eternal youth, a poisonous blessing from Zeus to the lover of Eos, the dawn. Long after the goddess has tired of her lover, he haunts her and she him. Haddon explores both the immediate consequences of immortality—the breakdown of family relationships, the inability to remain in one community for any length of time—and the real implications of what millennia are. Three thousand years pass a single day at a time, curling themselves into a care home in England where a figure too old to speak lies curled in a nursing bed, tended to without the comfort even of a name.
The collection’s other stories carry mythological energy without Classical origins. The cruelties of boarding-school boys transform themselves unexpectedly in middle age. A sleeping plague throws its dreamers into paradoxes worthy of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. A long-distance bicycle trip tumbles off course into an animal-testing nightmare.
The collections title, with its pointed play on gods and dogs, points to the cruelties inherent in power both mythological and scientific, human and animal. Our relationships across species lines are never as loving and sentimental as we’d like them to be, and as often as we’d like to think they make us better, they have no responsibility to do so. Haddon’s writing in each story is polished, so much that it holds up a disturbing mirror to its reader, demanding that we see what we don’t want to acknowledge but must. Dogs and Monsters is, in spite of the pain it brings, a magnificent book. It demands much of its reader but offers much in return.