Publishers Weekly
★ 05/20/2024
This vibrant collection of new and selected works from Watson, who died in 2020, showcases the author’s wry humor and taste for the bizarre. “Dying for Dolly” follows an ex-con who releases a novelty song about Dolly Parton and scores a spot opening for the singer. “The Zookeeper and the Leopard” concerns a zoo manager who sets a leopard free to antagonize the town’s chief animal control officer, whom he suspects of sleeping with his wife. Both stories draw sharp portraits of men in over their heads, while “Eykelboom,” written in third-person plural from the perspective of a close-knit Southern town, depicts the travails of a boy who moves there from “some crude and faceless Yankee state” and struggles to fit in. The title story begins in the register of a clinical report on a family’s car accident, which killed the father and maimed the teenage daughter, before swerving into an intriguing stew of gossip and speculation about the fate of the mother, who disappeared from the scene of the crash and may have been driving. In “Terrible Argument,” previously collected in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a couple’s pet dog observes their incessant bickering. This accomplished volume puts Watson’s impressive tonal and stylistic range on full display. It’s sure to satisfy fans and newcomers alike. (July)
Chris Offutt
"Brad Watson’s remarkable talent truly shines in short fiction. It’s hard to know which element is strongest—his bold inventiveness for story or the deep compassion he brings to his characters. As I read these wonderful stories, I often stopped to reread sentences, stricken by awe at his glittering prose. For those people already familiar with Brad’s work, you are in for a wonderful treat. If you’re new to his work, I envy you for the many books ahead of you to revel in."
Anthony Doerr
"A brilliant short story writer, Brad Watson could write breathless, comic scenes, or dreamy hallucinations, or glowering repartee; and he could surprise a reader with sudden breaks into the supernatural. He was as good at delivering riveting bursts of menace as he was at alleviating that menace with moments of transcendent beauty. Watson was always pursuing the mysteries of what it means to be human in the world; in There is Happiness, his singular, beautiful voice lives on."
Ron Rash
"What sets Watson’s work apart from his contemporaries is a singular strangeness. The world we know is always present, yet it is widened into something more wonderous, more heartfelt, and we find ourselves elevated into the sublime."
A. M. Homes
"If Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Conner had a one night stand—their spawn would be Brad Watson. His stories are as artful as they are unnerving. Watson renders the human experience with pathos and love. His work is singular, and essential in our understanding who we are and where we have come from. His early departure from this world leaves us aching for more."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-05-04
From an American original, a posthumous collection that includes short stories old and new.
Watson’s stories—those in the volumes published in his lifetime and the new ones—are wry, tender, darkly funny, and deeply idiosyncratic. His first book, Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), focused on dogs—always simply themselves, and therefore enviable and admirable—and often inhabited their bodies, channeled their voices. In one story here, “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” Watson’s animism goes yet further; a zookeeper’s miscalculated revenge against a rival results in his being eaten by a big cat...and by story’s end his consciousness has been scattered among piles of scat that carry—poignantly, if you can believe it—what remains of his voice. In the terrific introduction here, Joy Williams speaks of the “strange, piteous, futile, and fickle” characters—often thwarted men self-exiled from their families—who people Watson’s world, and the kinships between his work and hers come clear. There’s the attentiveness to animals and the conviction—which never seems mean-spirited—that they’re superior to people; there’s the strong, often elegiac sense of the natural world. But perhaps the strongest link is an imaginative fearlessness that seems, finally, doglike: Both Watson and Williams exemplify Watson’s remark that a dog “is who he is and his only task is to assert this.” The stories in Watson’s two earlier collections were excellent, lyrical, moving (see the title pieces, “Last Days of the Dog-Men” and the doomed-young-love story “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” both included here), but the new work seems even deeper, stranger, riskier. The title piece is surely the sweetest, gentlest story ever to center on the dialogue (yes, dialogue) between a serial killer and the wig stand that she’s covered with grim bodily trophies of her kills and named Elizabeth Bob. “Noon,” about the loneliness and emptiness that can enter a marriage post-stillbirth, ends with a dream in which the grieving woman, who is so delicately entwined with a catfish that her husband cannot, even with his best filleting knife, “detach the fish’s brain from her own,” dies. Her husband buries her in the yard, and over time, as she “drift[s] into the soil,” she keeps an eye on him. “The times between mowings were ages,” it concludes—a Watsonian happy ending.
Strange, wondrous, luminous—a lovely coda to a career (and a life) cut sadly short.
