THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608120169
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARY ADAMS-LACKEY
LENGTH: 65 lines
LAST DAYS OF THE DOG-MEN
Stories
BRAD WATSON
W.W. Norton. 144 pp. $19.
Although he creates pretty scenes with trees, lakes and splashing sunlight, put a dog in the picture and Brad Watson goes berserk.
His despicable people do horrible things to dogs in Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories, a first book.
Watson, a Mississippi native, teaches writing at the University of Arkansas.
A woman reads that racing greyhounds grown too slow to compete are destroyed. She goes to a racetrack, asks for and gets a dog for her husband, who then has an affair with the reporter who wrote the story. The woman catches them and has a veterinarian kill the dog.
Reality is elementary, Watson, in credible fiction. Fact-check, please.
``Retired'' greyhounds aren't available for the asking, but are placed in homes meeting rescue groups' criteria. And ethical veterinarians don't kill healthy dogs.
Watson's world is short on ethics.
The United Parcel Service delivers a heavy crate to a man. He puts it in his dining room and decides to use it to bury a dog he knows lies dying under his house.
An old girlfriend speaks from inside the box. She stays there, arguing first with the man and later with his dinner guests.
Possible?
To meet UPS regulations, contents and box could weigh no more than 150 pounds; the box would be roughly the size of a airline shipping crate for a German shepherd. To fit in it requires the woman be in a fetal position.
A decent man would rescue the sick dog, release the crazy lady and use the box as a bed for the dog.
Watson's people aren't that kind.
The host of a boozy barbecue has two Labrador retrievers, Buddy and Junior. His business partner owns Junior's mother, who, Watson writes, was ``carefully chosen'' as Buddy's mate. Yet Junior turns out to be ``a brute . . . a bully .
The man hates him, but his wife makes him keep the dog.
``A little genetic imbalance,'' he says, ``hard to avoid with these popular breeds.'' (Wrong. Careless breeding, not breed popularity, leads to unsound dogs.)
A good ol' boy tells of a hunting dog who chomped onto a wild hog's snout, had his head shot to bits, yet stayed attached because he was ``rigor-mortised onto that hog . . . wadn't anything now but a set of teeth attached to a carcass, just a body and jaws.''
Implausibility doesn't stop Watson. He uses this tidbit to give his protagonist hog and dog to serve at the barbecue.
Are you retching yet?
The Labs fight over a ball in a lake. Junior drowns Buddy. The man shoots at Junior. He misses. The dog runs away.
The man's wife has run off with his business partner. Both are missing.
Guess what else the guests are washing down with their beer?
Someone should take a rolled-up newspaper and swat Watson upside his head, then rub his nose in something offal - this book, for instance. MEMO: Mary Adams-Lackey is a free-lance writer who lives in Virginia
Beach. by CNB