Brad Watson: Last Days of the Dog-Men

In the last moments out on the porch, before we’d drifted inside in a dream of dusk, the afternoon had ticked down and shadows had deepened on the lake’s far bank. The other men, dazed, had shuffled away. Russell’s two younger sons had stood on the shore and tossed ropes with grappling hooks to retrieve old Buddy. Bailey’s boy stood on the bank hugging himself against some chill, watching them swing the hooks back over their shoulders and sling them, the long ropes trailing out over the lake, where the hooks landed with a little splash of silver water. A momentarily delayed report reached us, softly percussive, from across the water and the lawn. Bailey stood on the steps and watched them, his hands on top of his head.

“Look at that,” he whispered, the grief and regret of his life in the words. “Old Buddy.”

They brought the old dog out of the water. The boy, Lee, fell to his knees. Russell’s sons stood off to one side like pallbearers. Above the trees across the lake, a sky like tom orange pulp began to fade. Light seeped away as if extracted, and grainy dusk rose up from the earth. For a long while none of us moved. I listened to the dying sounds of birds out over the water and in the trees, and the faint clattering of small sharp tusks against steel fencing out in the grove, a sound that seemed to come from my own heart.

“A sad, beautiful meditation on love, loss, and dogs. Watson’s best writing is full of an unusual sort of lugubrious humor and depth.”

— Los Angeles Times

“A book for those of us who like our dogs doggy — that is, unsentimentalized, unanthropomorphized, decent-in-their-hearts vomit-eaters — and our people the same way. The prose is crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence.”

— Pinckney Benedict

“[T]he dogs are not pets so much as fully realized characters, the equals — sometimes the betters — of the men and women stirring up today’s Deep South. Watson writes with surprising emotional force.”

— Amy Hempel, Elle

“Stunning. superb. Should become essential to the canon.”

— Commercial Appeal [Memphis, Tennessee]

“Brad Watson’s prose is exciting, superb. Not a dull story here. Dogs? Well, often they’re more interesting than their masters, certainly more abiding. Watson’s people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs. I read these pieces with great pleasure.”

— Barry Hannah

“[B]racing prose, heralding the arrival of a new talent on the literary scene.”

— Tuscaloosa [Alabama] News

“Brad Watson is a writer still mystified by his own immense talent. How could he not be? He writes sentences you wait a lifetime for. Tells stories you’ve never heard. Last Days of the Dog-Men is the best I’ve read in ages. Mercy for none, but salvation for all.”

— Robert Olmstead

“Watson is a writer keenly aware of the duality of canine nature — the familiar, loving, always accepting domesticate, and the feral, wandering, howling wild animal. Extraordinary.”

— Clarion [Mississippi] Ledger

“ Last Days of the Dog-Men observes without blinking the inevitable, necessary, and bewildering relationships between people and dogs, between men and women. Brad Watson writes brilliantly and knows what he is talking about.”

— Fred Chappell

“The very nature of Last Days of the Dog-Men —a gathering of ‘dog’ tales that exploits both the loyal and the feral nature of man’s best friend — reflects Brad Watson’s comically dark and deceptively wry vision in a prose as accurate as it is lovely.”

— Allen Wier

“Brad Watson’s stories are wholly original — humorous and heartbreaking; there is a compassion for both humans and dogs and the world as they know it that reduces the focus to life’s bare minimums: food, shelter, and companionship. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a powerful debut by a master storyteller.”

— Jill McCorkle

“Consider me a serious fan of Watson’s brilliant storytelling. He’s as bull-hearted and true a writer as any of the Southern masters.”

— Bob Shacochis

“In the pages of his quietly crafted prose, Watson digs with a persistence only a canine tracing a scent can match, into piles of the familiar and intractable emotions of his characters, their relationships, and their dogs.”

— San Francisco Review

“[W]ry commentary on the base nature of humanity.”

— Macon [Georgia] Telegraph

“Stunning.”

— Spectator [Raleigh, N.C.]

“The insight and beauty with which [Watson] writes reveals a deep love for both dogs and people, and yet his unflinching gaze at their abiding foibles seems to have provoked in him an intense anger at their unpardonable sins.”

— Trenton [New Jersey] Times

“A powerful debut collection.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Watson has uncanny insight.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“HIS PEOPLE AND DOGS — THOSE WONDERFUL DOGS!

— COME ALIVE WITH HONEST, THRUMMING ENERGY.”

— New York Times Book Review

BRAD WATSONis the award-winning author of two collections of stories and two novels, The Heaven of Mercury , which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award, and Miss Jane (2016). His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature , and Idaho Review , among other publications. He teaches at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.

In each of these “weird and wonderful stories” ( Boston Globe ), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. “Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts” ( New York Newsday ), Watson’s vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality — yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment.

Pinckney Benedict praises Watson’s writing as “crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence,” and Fred Chappell calls his stories “strong and true to the place they come from.” This powerful debut collection marks Watson’s introduction into “a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford” ( The State , Columbia, S.C.).