The cover of Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon’s new collection of myth-inspired tales, displays—not surprisingly—a dog. His tail stretches out to form a circular path, suggesting a creature at the center of a labyrinth. It’s a fitting image, as this collection features dogs aplenty, lurking in corners and occasionally taking centerstage.
And there are monsters here, too: a subterranean essence hiding at the heart of the structure. It’s with this image—dog, tail and all—that we get a hint of what Haddon is about. Both this cover and the tales that lie beneath gesture toward something savage and incomprehensible at the center of ourselves. We catch it in glimpses, illuminated by terror and ecstasy. Haddon finds these devastating moments in the ancient and the modern, across centuries and across continents, in moments when mythic themes—the alternation of creation and destruction, the devastating transformations that result—repeat endlessly, the heartbeat of the human condition.
Opening the collection, “The Mother’s Story” sets the tone by translating the myth of the Minotaur (hinted at on the cover) from ancient Greece to Renaissance England. It’s a world without literal monsters but rife with metaphorical ones. Haddon takes the point of view of Pasiphae, the Greek queen whose dalliance with a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur. Here she is the nameless wife of an egotistical and autocratic lord, and her monster-child simply an infant with birth defects. His father sees the child as more than a disappointment; he’s a threat to the family’s reputation and power. He shuts the child in a dungeon to live in filth and darkness, eating scraps, denied human nurturing and touch except during his mother’s surreptitious visits.
By the tale’s end, the lord has transformed both his children, the son and a later-born daughter, into monsters. The boy, originally branded so by his physical appearance, grows into something unpredictable, semi-verbal, racked by bouts of unquenchable rage and a detachment from humankind born of a childhood of trauma, isolation, and abuse. His younger sister is monstrous in a different way, raised up to be a version of her father’s selfishness and cruelty rendered in miniature, like an Athena sprung from the head of a godlike father. It’s a vision of patriarchy gone rancid, a mother’s love and patience the only stay against the violence too deep to fully assuage with nurturing and devotion. There are current-day resonances as well. From his rendition of the queen’s so-called bestiality to the construction of the maze, Haddon imagines a version of the tale in which the power of disinformation and rumor take the place of supernatural forces and labyrinth-building engineers. He draws no explicit parallel to our time; he need not. The relevance is all too clear.
Not all of the stories are set in the past. Haddon arranges these eight stories according to length, alternating long and short tales, some set in ancient times, others rooted in the modern day. The last long story (although not the final in the collection) stretches from the past to the present, tracing the life of Tithonus, granted immortality by his lover, Eos, the goddess of the dawn. In a clever gesture, Haddon reflects this “then, now, and forever” scope in his table of contents, which, after the first tale on page 1, lists “000” as all subsequent page numbers.
In the modern tales, the theme of hubris, that common motif of Greek mythology, finds an apt setting in the genres of speculative fiction and sci-fi. In “The Bunker,” a woman is called to account for sins committed in a forgotten alternate dimension, while in “The Wilderness,” scientists in a remote Island of Dr. Moreau-esque compound reap the havoc spawned by their aspirations to godlike power. “My Old School” switches gears, presenting the horrors of English public schools in a way that projects the mythic motifs of violence, cruelty, and catastrophe onto the modern world while puncturing the epic mood with a moment of self-revelation so common to ancient tales.
Dead-center is “D.O.G.Z.,” the Ur-text of the collection, which retells that most tumultuous of dog-myths, the tale of Actaeon, the hunter transformed into a deer and dismembered by his dogs after glimpsing the naked goddess Artemis (by implication, a vision of the divine not meant for men’s eyes). “Sit back and take the long view,” the narrator invites us, investing in the dogs’ point of view and catapulting forward several millennia to explicate a different sacrifice, one with the canine as victim. The last few pages are gripping, violent, and tragic, unveiling the horror behind the search for knowledge and revelations of “what no man should ever see,” an echo of Actaeon’s unwitting sin.
Which returns us to the titular canines. “Dogs” replaces “Gods,” a clever twist on a common phrase, but a meaningful one. Haddon’s fictional universe contains few gods. When they do appear, they are glimpsed slantwise, notable for their capriciousness and cruelty.
In their place are the dogs. Haddon clearly has a thing for them (see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), but there is a dual resonance here. “Man’s best friend,” we call them, but like Actaeon’s hunting dogs, they are also capable of ripping a person apart. Which leads to the other monster at the center of this collection: the wolf. Throughout the tales, we glimpse this shadow animal: a howl in the night, a whispered warning—reminders of what that lurks beyond the campfire light. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously called it “the raw and the cooked,” that fine line between the wild and the tame, the feral and the civilized. After all, within each dog is a wolf. That’s the insight at the heart of Haddon’s latter-day myths: a reminder of the wild and violent in us all, the thin veneer of civilization in a world populated by humans striving to become gods but remaining at their heart animals. It is through Haddon’s power as a storyteller—his sharp, surprising images and dizzying observations—that we glimpse these moments of mythic insight, obliteration, and transformation in both ancient times and our own, with all the terror and inevitability of a myth.
FICTION
Dogs and Monsters: Stories
By Mark Haddon
Doubleday Books
Published October 15, 2024
