It's A Dog-Eat-Dog World

Arthur Bradford, a young and hip writer with a growing, young and hip following, has turned the likes of Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers into his groupies, as evidenced by the blurbs accompanying his debut collection of short stories, Dogwalker. Bradford, who is being presented as the cool new kid on the block, lives up to his hype with this hilariously irreverent, deceptively simple and decidedly cool collection of short stories.

Images of dogs, mutants and social outcasts permeate all 12 stories in Dogwalker. The first person narrator, who remains relatively consistent throughout, explores a dark, sinister and twisted world with such unperturbed sang-froid that the most outrageous and absolutely surreal events seen like common place occurrences. The passive and directionless narrator of each story lacks any roots or real home. He is a loner whose life is dictated by chance and who passively allows fate to govern his existence. A motley collection of three-legged dogs, mutated puppies, deformed human beings, psychopaths, overgrown slugs, drug addicts, women who practice black magic and dangerous roommates move in and out of his life, creating mayhem. Yet through it all the narrator remains unflappable.

“Dogs,” the most outrageous of his stories, begins with the opening line “No doubt you’ll think I’m strange when I tell you I’ve been making love with my girlfriend’s dog. But that is not my most unsettling secret.” He continues to tell us about the strange, singing little man who dresses up as a muskrat that is a result of their union. The plot thickens when this little man impregnates a woman who is living in an iron lung and helps spawn four talking puppies. The story ends when the narrator finds these four puppies and tells us that he has finally found a family. This surreal story is told in such a terse, direct way that one begins to forget that there anything unusual about it.

In “Roslyn’s Dog,” the last story in Dogwalker, the narrator gets bitten by his neighbor, Roslyn’s dog. In a Kafka-like twist, the narrator wakes up with a hairy patch on the spot where he was bitten. Before long, he has turned into a dog and gets kissed by the dog that has bitten him. This dog turns into a woman, and the narrator has become Roslyn’s new dog. “Rosyln’s Dog,” is a prime example of Bradford’s attempt to merge the animal world with the human one. Through the prevalent theme of dogs he shows how the human and animal worlds are not so very different.

Not all of Bradford’s stories recount fantastical episodes involving dogs, but many of the stories involving humans are tinted with magical realism and bizarre turns of events. “Chainsaw Apple,” for instance, is a deeply unsettling and deliciously satisfying story concerning a woman whose face is disfigured by a man who tries to carve her initials into an apple she holds in her mouth. In “Bill McQuill,” the narrator nonchalantly informs us, “The train had run Bill over just below the waist, cutting him in two. It was strange actually, because one of the wheels was still on top of him. His legs and feet must have been over on the other side.” It is this contrast between outlandish actual event and cool, indifferent narrative reaction that makes Dogwalker as powerful as it is. The lurid events and dark underworld that his characters inhabit suggest that Dogwalker is a serious commentary on the isolation and desolation that has become endemic in contemporary society.

And yet the unbelievable hilarity of his writing convinces one that Dogwalker is a fundamentally optimistic book. Bradford’s macabre sense of humor keeps one chuckling throughout this short, easy read. His tight, compact sentences, unflorid writing style and sparingly-used adjectives add to the charm of Dogwalker and prevent passages that would otherwise be over the top from becoming irritating. Although some might accuse Bradford of being a little too cool, a little too ironic and a little too glib for his own good, his arch and acerbic tone prevent him from becoming heavy handed or sentimental, a far worse accusation.

Dogwalker

by Arthur Bradford

Knopf

144 pp., $20