Customer Reviews

Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories

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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.

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.

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

Watson's using Dogdom as a point of reference for human yearnings and frustrations is a master stroke. Though his blending of hilarity and pathos might be called a characteristic of Southern Lit., his voice and his insights are unique. This book is a "keeper."

I was fully engrossed with the characterization and development of not only the dogs but the intensity of their relationships with humans. The reviewer who claimed she's an animal lover but hated this is obviously not a person with depth and would probably be more comfortable reading happy-go-lucky fluff. This reading is for intelligent, introspective types with a penchant for thought provoking and imaginative storytelling. For days, even months after I was thinking and even dreaming of these short gems. It takes a lot to touch me and Watson delivered.

Brad Watson's stories satisfy by their authenticity, their origins in the oral traditions of the American south, their foundations in the rich, fertile soil of its storytelling culture.
His characters move freely from page to mind, loitering with the reader, lingering, as if they were old acquaintances who needed to be nowhere in particular. They sift through the detritus of their lives, recovering seemingly little at first, discovering only later the clarity that often tags along with realization and acceptance.
It is Watson's language that animates these stories though. His sentences, often approaching poetic, delight, demanding to be read again and again. Words cavort ,mingle in a surprising synergism. Many of the stories are deceptively essayistic, adding to their authenticity.
This is a fine collection by a gifted writer.

This is a collection of 8 short stories, each one with a dog involved, its behaviors and relationship with the people driving the story. There is no doubt that Brad Watson is a talented writer. His characters jump off the page presenting themselves to you forcefully. Some of his metaphors and similes left me shaking my head mumbling, 'how did he come up with that?'

Having said that, I didn't enjoy Last Days entirely. This is a sad, ugly book. I had no problem with the melancholy characters and the beautiful way Watson presented their lives. But some of these stories are inhabited by ugly people doing cruel things, both to other people and to the dogs in their lives. If you are a dog lover as I am, be forewarned that dogs die in this book at the hands of selfish, arrogant characters.

...and this collection of stories - each of which deals in some way with `man's best friend' - is good writing from start to finish. Every single story in this collection is compelling and well written - and some of them are absolute jewels. Watson's characters are drawn with care, embodying realism as well as the author's empathy for them. The cadences of their speech - and thoughts - are perfect. Their lives are at once flawed and filled with wonderful things - rather like the lives of each of us. Watson's use of the dogs in the stories to bind them together as a whole is a gentle and natural one - it never comes across as contrived.

`Last days of the dog-men' and `A retreat' offer poignant and painful looks at how our lives can spiral downward when relationships come to an end. As easy as it would seem for these stories to be maudlin and depressing, Watson never allows that to happen. The humanity of his characters remains strong, even in their seemingly darkest hours - whatever we might think about them, and what actions brought them to their sorry states, they are never less than real. `Agnes of Bob' and `Bill' are touching portraits of couples - widows and the dogs with whom they live after the deaths of their spouses. The relationships between the women and the dogs are as unique as those that develop between close friends. `Seeing eye' gives us a glimpse of not only the practical aspects of the assistance a guide dog offers to a visually-impaired owner - Watson manages to get inside the relationship and reveals deeper aspects of it than might appear at a casual glance. `A blessing' is a little surreal - a couple attempts to acquire a new dog, and an evident wrong turn leads them to the home of a man who is extremely odd and malevolent.

The only two stories I have to say that I didn't enjoy as much as the others would be `The wake' - which seemed to me to be a little `forced', and reminded me of the old song by the Velvet Underground, `The gift' - and `Kindred spirits', in which a man tricks his friends into becoming accomplices in a crime he has committed. Even this last story had many redeeming qualities, however - and I certainly can't dismiss the collection because of these two quibbles.

Watson's prose is strong and gently descriptive - so much so that I often found myself smiling at his talents, discovering that I had, over the course of a few pages, come to picture characters and whole scenes in my mind without noticing where he was leading me. I've heard lots of good things about his novel THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY - and after reading an excerpt from it in the stellar collection STORIES FROM THE BLUE MOON CAFÉ, and then the excellence contained in LAST DAYS OF THE DOG-MEN, I'm looking forward to it even more.

LAST DAYS OF THE DOG-MEN BRAD WATSON W.W. NORTON Wisdom comes in many different forms. This first collection of short fiction by the American Brad Watson is crystalline, brilliant. His prose is deft, honed, confident The dogs in these stories are prismatic figures that both reflect and refract incidents in the lives of their human counterparts. These dogs cast a revealing light into the human world; they allow the unspeakable to be uttered; they illuminate emotions shadowed by convention, propriety, familiarity The shocking clarity of Watson's prose incises, knife-sharp, through the protective layers we wrap around our hidden fears - moral frailty, sickness, old-age, death, love, duty, guilt. More than mere alter-egos these dogs are also household gods. They watch speechlessly over men and women who come to rely on them through the pain of becoming reluctantly aware of the frightening shapes their lives are on the verge of taking. In the title story men find their dreams merging, mingling with "the dreams of dogs who must dream of the chase, the hunt, of bitches in heat, the mingling of old spoors with their own musty odours. And deep in sleep they dream of space travel, of dancing on their hind legs, of being men with the heads and muzzles of dogs, of sleeping in beds with sheets, of driving cars, of taking off their fur coats each night and making love fact to face. Of cooking their food. And Harold and I dream of days of following the backs of men's knees, and faint trails in the soil, the overpowering odours of all our kin, our pasts, every mistake as strong as sulphur, our victories lingering traces here and there." Dogs somehow come occupy the space of loss, expanding into the interstices of failure, of sadness. In 'Agnes of Bob' Bob the Boston bulldog "sniffing the breeze (...) his image snuffed in fog" trots away to find freedom beyond the garden fence, inspiring his elderly owner to seek her own adventure that begins, or ends, with her arrival at the seashore, where she closes "both eyes to sleep as the molten sun boiled up, cyclopic, from the water." 'A Blessing' is about confronting human viciousness disguised as dispassion, about innocent eyes being opened to the glare of a terrifying reality, amidst the lolling tongues and wagging tails of dogs in search of compassion and companionship. In 'A Retreat' Mary lies in front of the fire with a rabbit under her front paws and begins "to eat it almost delicately, sniffing it and licking it as if it were her pup and she were eating it almost lovingly in maternal wonder." She is consuming, by proxy, the lonely pain of Ivan who struggles to recover from a divorce in which both wife and child are taken from him. Watson is not without a sense of humour - here is Ivan's universalising explanation of how he ended up with the dog after his wife left him: "They leave you with all the stuff, even the animals, and you can't get rid of them or don't want to, and you've got all this shit reminding you of how you fucked up (...) they've cut themselves completely loose, no strings, clean slate. You've got all the baggage. Next time you see them, they've lost weight and cut their hair and feel just great about themselves (...) they've got the soul of a bluebird. You realise they were absolutely miserable with you all along." 'The Wake' is an absurdist melodrama about a woman who returns to her partner Sam via UPS delivery, having posted herself down to him in a wooden box, arriving when he is in the process of digging a grave for a stray dog who has died under the house. The stench of its quiet death is a reminder of the impossibility of their relationship. 'Kindred Spirits' initially tells the tale of a lawyer compromised by his estranged wife who asks him - in order to get rid of his client who she ran off with a few years before - to get access to the incriminating evidence he has regarding the trial : "But I have never opened the file (...) I have not bothered to prod that little pocket in my brain. I have detoured around it as easily as I swerve around a sawhorsed manhole in the street." Despite his attempts to remain ignorant, unenlightened, this man finds himself dragged into a world of violence, adultery and murder at the barbecue he attends along with a group of hunting buddies. The different dogs we encounter in this tale act as metaphors for the activities of a jealous husband and his loyal black servant; for the lies and intrigues revealed in the drunken storytelling that takes place at an idyllic lakeside. They represent the men stripped of their pretences to civility, reason and humanity

This book may well have been filled with great writing, however, as a dog owner and lover, I was disgusted and depressed reading these stories. The reviews on the book cover give little indication as to the repeated ugliness within. If you are a parent, imagine reading story after detached story of babies being killed, lost and neglected. For me, any great writing was overshadowed by my sympathies for the dogs. Not what I expected and very sad.