Excellent ... Haddon’s inventive and entertaining tales find new ways of exploring age-old themes – fate and mortality, love and betrayal, loneliness and madness. All showcase the enduring power of storytelling.
The stories in this splendid new collection are inspired by an eclectic variety of sources ... The work of a consummate storyteller, the brilliantly conceived Dogs and Monsters illuminates a variety of species, both real and mythical, including our own.
Whether supernatural, realistic, SF or mythological, Mark Haddon’s supple and emotionally involving tales turn on the observation of Pasiphae: that monsters don’t exist. After all, if it exists, then it’s not a monster.
Haddon captures the resilience of maternal love ... Haddon has a dark, visceral, imagination ... The collection — which has moments of brilliance but is suffocated by its many allusions — speaks to literature’s participation in, or ingestion by, a larger vogue for karaoke culture ... Whether the source material is being used as a crutch or an exercise in brand recognition, it feels cynical as well as cyclical, while pre-used hooks all too often have blunt barbs. Also, on a fundamental level, a fiction writer persistently following another author’s lead — even to interesting ends — isn’t really doing their job. A plasterer isn’t an architect. Haddon, one of Britain’s most inventive storytellers, would be wise to return to his own blueprints.
These delicately worked and impressively patient stories show us what other visions might reveal themselves when we are not in too much of a hurry to get to the end.
The tight prose and descriptive range are remarkable ... There isn’t much room for redemption in this wise, immersive book: but there is always space for a bat-squeak of hope.
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.
Some tales confuse more than enlighten, and the overall effect is somber, while the best stories offer elegant prose and astute insights into humanity.
