Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories [Hardcover]

Brad Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1996

In prose so precise and beautiful it makes a reader's hair stand on end, Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. In each of these stories he captures the animal crannies of the human personality - yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Ultimately, however, people are responsible where dogs are not: "I'm told in medieval times, " the narrator of the title story tells us, "animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Frequently portrayed as beer-guzzling, duck-shooting, wife-beating bigots, Southern white men don't catch much of a break these days. Yet in Last Days of Dog-Men, Brad Watson manages to portray this much-maligned beast with empathy and insight. Equally important, he also manages to make clear the importance of their dogs--an importance that can cut both ways. In the title story, for example, a man has an affair that's consummated in the foam-rubber pole-vault pad at the local playing field. When his wife finds out, she gets even the surest way she knows how, by having his dog put to sleep.

From Publishers Weekly

Dogs, in their simplicity and certainty, have an emotional stature equal to that of the people whose souls they seem to mirror in these eight precisely crafted stories. "Humans," says the narrator of the title story, "are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life... the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. He is who he is, and his only task is to assert this." This narrator takes up jogging with a greyhound that helps him get back into shape, until his wife has the dog put to sleep, to get back at him for cheating on her. In "The Wake," a highly symbolic, surreal tale, a stray dog's death beneath a man's house coincides with his receipt in the mail of a packing crate that contains his ex-lover, whose accusatory voice confronts him with past mistakes and failures and his tendency, as it were, to let dead dogs lie. "Bill" concerns an octogenarian woman whose main companion, a trembling, almost blind poodle, means more to her than her husband, who's confined to a rest home. Dogs in these enigmatic stories are inextricably linked with human destinies, marking the trajectories of lives, marriages, jobs, secret affairs, divorces. Alabama-based Watson has uncanny insight into canine psychology and, beyond that, into how people project their own emotions, aggression, love and insecurities onto pets and the animal kingdom.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 146 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; First Edition edition (April 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393039269
• ISBN-13: 978-0393039269
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,829,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Jewel of a Book, August 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men (Paperback)

This is a very fine book, containing writing of such finely chiselled precision that I'd often find myself stunned into introspection by the power of Watson's insight or a particularly poignant turn of phrase. This doesn't happen often; it's the power of deep music or a great painting to stop you right there! to think it out.

Watson's use of the dog to illuminate the spirit of humanity and its tangle of desire is sublimely realized. He deftly avoids reducing the dog or its humans to Obvious Metaphor, a move that would have been all too easy if he'd conceived this relationship as Hallmark-type schmaltz. The people and dogs in these pages transcend mere caricature; they become more than the sum of the words used to describe them and achieve something like living. It's an uncanny evocation of the complex world of pain, desire and loss that lurks just beneath the patina of everyday memory and dull rationalization. Like some animal supersense, Watson's writing cuts through the veneer of the commonplace to examine the crux of our most important matters. Watson gives us ourselves, unprettified and naked, shivering with emotion and memory and the ugly afterbirth of the various tragedies that compose the fabric of our lives.

These are stories to be cherished and enjoyed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book, April 12, 2010

By 

Ann-oh - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories (Paperback)

I am not enthusiastic about short stories, but this collection was a page turner.
It's got some southern gothic in it, sure, but I didn't find it depressing. Rich
and very pleasurable.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic-to-be in the horror genre, July 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories (Hardcover)

This is another book review by Wolfie and Kansas, the boonie dogs from Toto, Guam. Human reviewers seem to have trouble placing the stories in Brad Watson's "Last Days of the Dog-Men" in the proper genre, describing these little gems as literary fiction. To dogs, however, these stories belong in the horror genre. In practically every story, a dog is murdered. From a canine viewpoint, these stories are what we would expect from Edgar Allen Poe if he had decided to use dogs as victims in his stories.

Watson's treatment of his canine characters is surprisingly good for a human author. Our only complaint is that he nonetheless spends more time developing his human characters. While he handles them well, they are intrinsically less interesting than dogs. Perhaps in his next collection, Watson will dispense with the noncanine animals of primate derivation and focus exclusively on dogs