Mistreated, abused or misunderstood dogs achieve superhuman and supercanine feats but leave readers with little to gnaw on.
In this collection of short stories, first-time author Cannon features the often violent experiences of dogs.
In Cannon’s work of fiction, individual dogs have as many personality types as humans and many of the same prejudices and character flaws. The dogs included here are hardly the beloved pets that curl up with the family on the sofa or chase sticks in the park. They participate fully in conversations, and they communicate clearly to one another but not directly to the humans. Brutality is commonplace in all the stories, which have a distinctly 1980s, urban ambience. The subject of the first story, “Brisk,” is a street-smart pit bull who must fight in an illegal dogfighting ring in a dark basement. In a setup evoking prison movies such as Stalag 17, the dogs attempt to make life tolerable for themselves as the sadistic guard dog Buzzsaw mistreats and starves them. One brave dog volunteers to help in stilted prose, “One of us must confront Buzzsaw for the life of us all….Under these exigent circumstances, we haven’t much choice.” When the inevitable battle royal erupts, it includes guns, bystanders, police, vicious criminals and many dogs. Some are maimed, and a few killed. Under such duress, canines become capable of numerous unlikely heroic acts, including the unlocking of cage doors. Helena, the beautiful German shepherd in the second story, is in the rigorous training program to become the city’s first female police dog. Much like human females breaking barriers in the armed services or fire departments, Helena endures mockery, isolation and even assault. Male dogs taunt her with outdated, inane comments such as, “We just don’t want no broads lousing up things.” The canines’ speech is as clichéd as the humans in many of the stories: The male dogs call the female a “skirt” and a “skank.” Far from using touches of magical realism, the narrative attempts bizarre and outlandish plot twists, such as a successful dog-to-human bone marrow transplant and retired greyhound racing dogs sold off to poor families for food.
Mistreated, abused or misunderstood dogs achieve superhuman and supercanine feats but leave readers with little to gnaw on.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463580469
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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