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To Say Nothing of the Dog
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In rummaging through the nooks and crannies of animal (and other) life, James Roderick Burns’ debut flash fiction collection explores what it means to be human. From grandiloquent raccoons, entrancing a whole community in the stadium, to melancholy terriers dissecting the motivations of their masters - while taking apart something a little more tangible - To Say Nothing of the Dog goes to places longer fiction wouldn’t dare: into the gloomy, revealing guts of things, where foibles come to light and polite conventions are reduced to their essence. By turns comic and dark, these 38 compact tales punch well above their weight, and introduce a startling new voice to contemporary fiction. REVIEW As the title suggests, dogs appear often in James Roderick Burns’s debut flash fiction collection—not merely as pets, but as dualistic signifiers of safety and mystery, comfort and danger, love and death. The wonderfully unreliable narrator of “Stealing Wignal,” looking back on his acquisition of the titular dog, muses, “Right from the start, I knew which mallet would do the job, didn’t I boy? . . . She was a lovely looking young lady, and very nice I’m sure. But she had you and I didn’t, and that wasn’t right.” Thus, Burns reminds us of how flimsy the barrier between good and evil can be when there’s something we want, or want to avoid—the cravings and fears that transmute harmless beings into monsters. Burns—also the author of an English-language haiku collection, Crows at Dusk—shows a surprising and satisfying synthesis of influences, from the classic Victorian ghost stories of M. R. James to the evocative tradition of Japanese poetry. Like a good haiku poem, Burns’s pieces often imply more than they say, rewarding close, repeat readings. Like a good ghost story, they often leave a lingering chill. There is great diversity of voice and setting in To Say Nothing of the Dog, which moves easily from satire to horror to pathos, with a cast of characters including vampires, angsty teens, office workers, werewolves, cannibalistic vultures, and—in the title story—cadaver-munching dogs who gripe, between mouthfuls, about the negligence of their human owners. In one standout bit of satire, “Minutes of the 237th Meeting of the North American Man-Cow Love Association (Approved),” Burns hilariously skewers, by proxy, all groups that rationalize repugnant ideologies. He is equally, mercilessly funny in “Rat Jacket Attraction,” concerning a group of ne’er-do-wells trying to name their nonexistent rock band. By way of contrast, in “Wabi-Sabi,” Burns touchingly imagines Kaiichi Watanabe, a 19th-century Japanese bridge engineer in Scotland, struggling, in the midst of machine-driven modernity, to compose nature poems to send home to his mother. Burns’ most moving stories center on childhood innocence. Depicting a baby’s first encounter with snow in “Equal Magic,” Burns writes: “As we watched, the one-year-old, the couple, lifted their hands to the deluge, letting its glistening cold powder their hair, penetrate collars, melt through lips like an unexpected sigh.” The same eloquent sincerity marks the final story, “Ted & Edward,” a tale of a lost idyll that sinks straight into the reader’s heart. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a collection that gives equal weight to the malevolent and the benevolent, the absurd and the profound. Yes, Burns seems to say, there are indeed threatening forces in wait beneath the surface of our beloved ordinary things. But no, they will not always devour us. ---------------------------------------------------------
Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist originally from Western Montana. In another life, she earned her master’s degree in modern Japanese literature from Ohio State University in 2006. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Five South, J Journal, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, HAD, Stanchion, Literary Mama, Bending Genres, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is a Jar, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been featured on the covers of Cobra Milk, Adanna Literary Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, and Cream Scene Carnival, and she regularly contributes commissioned illustrations to Flash Frog. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com. |
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