Dogs and Monsters

Haddon (The Porpoise) draws on Greek mythology and science fiction for a potent collection of stories about human foibles and desires. In “The Mother’s Story,” a woman sticks up for her Minotaur son, who, far from being a monster, is a neurodivergent boy rejected by his princely father. “D.O.G.Z” begins with a retelling of the scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where mortal Actaeon encounters goddess Diana bathing, then swerves into an account of the progeny of Ovid’s 33 dogs. “The Quiet Limit of the World” riffs on the Greek myth of Tithonus, who was made immortal by the goddess Eos, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Haddon is wickedly good at gore, as when Actaeon is eviscerated by his dogs, or when, in “My Old School,” the protagonist watches impotently as a fellow student hangs himself. He also pulls off grand lyricism from the perspectives of superhumans and immortals such as Tithonus, who, while cared for in the present day by his Jamaican nurse, laments the futility of the human condition (“Their presumption at giving themselves names when there is so little difference between this one and the next”), and critiques the results of human ingenuity—the astrolabe, the steam engine, the watch (“the most ridiculous affectation, a kind of pretended ownership of that thing over which mortals have least control”). This is divine. (Oct.)