Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2024

Mark Haddon has to be my favorite living writer of short non-genre fiction. The eight stories gathered in this collection are nearly all gems.

Haddon often grounds stories in ancient history or mythology, finding new ways to make them relevant to a modern reader. The longest and — to me — the most interesting story is “The Quiet Limit of the World.” This story follows Tithonus who has been granted eternal life but not eternal youth by Eos. He ages slowly and discovers the curse of immortality; “what might have begun as grounds for envy or congratulations is tipping into something more sinister.” He leaves home because he does not want to endure the guilt of living when he will eventually bury his wives and children. Tithonus fights wars in the ancient world, survives the plague in the Middle Ages, is astonished by the destructive power of the twentieth century. Only Eos keeps him tethered to the world after he can no longer read or hear. The story is sad and touching.

Another favorite, “The Mother’s Story,” is the oddest entry, if only because it contains the sentence “My wife has given birth to a mooncalf.” Haddon explains that the story is “a reworking of the myth of Pasiphaë and her son Asterion, otherwise known as the Minotaur.” The woman must pretend to have been made pregnant by a bull to spare her husband the shame of fathering a repellant child. A scheme to use the child to terrorize (and thus control) the kingdom depends on a simple truth: “There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open.” Followed years later by another truth that explains why people allow themselves to be ruled by leaders who hold power by making them afraid of others: “I sometimes think people get a great deal of unaccountable pleasure from being absolute fools.”

“D.O.G.Z.” retells Ovid’s version of the ancient myth of Actaeon. To punish him for viewing her mysteries as she was frolicking with other naked women in the woods, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. The scene in which Actaeon is ripped apart by his hunting dogs is fittingly gruesome. The story has barely ended before the narrator begins to dissect it, comparing it to Acusilaus’s version and asking whether the story isn’t really about the dogs before exploring other dogs of literary fame as well as offering a poignant salute to Russian doggy astronauts. This is the only story in which it seemed to me that Haddon lost the plot.

“The Wilderness” is a tense story with the feel of a thriller. A woman is bicycling around the world to avoid coping with the loss of her brother. She has an accident while riding her bike in a remote area. Her rescuer saves her from death but brings her to a fenced-in place where she stumbles upon scientists experimenting with genetic editing. After a time, she wonders whether the scientists are turning her into an animal or whether she has she always been one. A daring escape leads to an encounter with other escaped women who are primed for revenge.

“The Bunker” might be an allegorical story. The protagonist is a nurse who finds herself from time to time transported to a bunker (a repurposed Cold War fallout shelter) in a postapocalyptic world. Is she losing her mind? The answer is unclear, although an exorcist who promises to lead her home apparently leads her to a terrifying new reality.

Also high on the strangeness scale is “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The saint resists all the usual temptations that the devil puts in front of him before abandoning his solitary life to preach, only to realize that the devil is tempting him with a new trap.

“My Old School” is a boarding school story. The protagonist saves himself from bullying by betraying a school chum’s secret. Years later, the protagonist realizes how the betrayal affected the other student’s life.

Haddon explains that the shortest entry, “St. Brides Bay,” is written to accompany Virginia Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I probably should have read Woolf’s story to get more out of this one, which consists of an aging woman’s rambling thoughts as she attends a lesbian wedding. She contemplates progress and her mother and a woman named Lucy with whom she had a three-month fling when same-sex love was forbidden.

Haddon is a gifted storyteller and a prose master. Readers who love a carefully constructed sentence that is driven by original thought are a good audience for Haddon’s short stories.

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