More curious canine incidents: Dogs and Monsters, by Mark Haddon, reviewed

Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines between man and beast, divine and mortal, and what’s real and what isn’t.

In ‘The Mother’s Story’, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth, the action is transported to quasi-medieval England. The first-person narrator is Pasiphae (though unnamed), whose ruthless husband has locked up her son Paul, born ‘a moon calf’. Horribly abused, Paul is transformed by the lies of ‘the engineer’ (the Daedalus analogue) into a monster to whom criminals are ‘fed’. Haddon explores a maze of misinformation, manipulation and power relations between men and women, able and disabled. It’s a gripping exploration of narratives and those who control them.