Though he's best known for his award-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. "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 "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 reflects on her 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