Dogs and Monsters

Description

Dogs and Monsters
by Mark Haddon

ISBN: 9780385550864
Hardcover, new
Publication Date 10/15/2024

Brief Description:
From the “terrifyingly talented” (London Times) author of THE CURIOUS
INCIDENT OF THE DOG-IN THE NIGHT-TIME and THE PORPOISE, eight mesmerizingly
imaginative, deeply-humane stories that use Greek myths and contemporary
dystopian narratives to examine mortality, moral choices and the many
variants of love. Greek myths have fascinated people for millenia, seeing
in them lessons about fate and hubris and the contingency of existence.
Mark Haddon digs into the heart of these ancient fables and sees them anew.
The dawn goddess Eos asked asks Zeus to give her lover Tithonus eternal
life, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. In “The Quiet Limit of the
World” Haddon imagines Tithonus’ life as he slowly ages over thousands of
years, turning the cautionary tale of tempting the gods into a spellbinding
meditation on witnessing death from the outside, and ultimately, how carnal
love evolves into something richer and more poignant with time. In “The
Mother’s Story,” Haddon takes the myth of the minotaur in his labyrinth, in
which the beast is the spawn of the monstrous lust of the king’s wife
Pasiphae, and turns it into a wrenching parable of maternal love for a
damaged child, and the more real monstrosities of patriarchy. In “D.O.G.Z.”
the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag after glimpsing the naked
goddess Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral
metaphor about the continuum of human and animal behavior. Other stories
play with contemporary mythic tropes – genetic engineering, trying to
escape the future, the viciousness of adolescent ostracism – to showcase
how modern humans are subject to the same capriciousness that obsessed the
Greeks. Haddon’s tales cover a vast range, from the mythic to the domestic,
from ancient Greece to the present day, from stories about love to stories
about cruelty, from battlefields to bed and breakfasts, from dogs in space
to doors between worlds, all of them bound together by a profound sympathy
and an understanding of how human beings act and think and feel when pushed
to the very edge. Throughout Haddon’s supple prose showcases his
astonishing powers of observation, of both the physical world and the
workings of the psyche. His vision is clear-eyed, but always resolutely
empathetic.