Dog on Fire
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Out of a Shakespearean-wild Midwest dust storm, a man rises. “Just a glimpse of him,” says his sister; “every inch of him,” says his guilt-filled lover. “Close your eyes,” says his nephew. “What about it?” asks his father. The cupboard is filled with lime Jell-O, and there are aliens, deadly kissing, and a restless, alcoholic mother who carries a gun. “Every family is this normal,” insists the narrator. “Whoever noticed my brother, with a family as normal as this?” the beleaguered sister asks. Against the smoky prairie horizon and despite his seizures, a brother builds a life. Imbued with melancholy cheer, Dog on Fire unfolds around a family’s turmoil, past loves, and a mysterious death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Svoboda (Great American Desert) delivers a lyrical Midwestern gothic. The novel opens when a woman sees her brother's ghost (both are unnamed) in a dust storm holding a shovel, a totem from his time working as a trim digger. The brother has been dead a month now, and since then his sister has been investigating what led to him being felled by a mysterious seizure. She begins with his lover, Aphra, the last one to see him alive, and listens to Aphra's painful life story involving a sexually abusive father. The siblings' father, meanwhile, chalks up his son's death to the work of aliens or the mob, or his son's handling of depleted uranium during his time in the military. More important than the sister's search for the truth are the many zany episodes: a séance, the auctioning of a hot tub, an attempt to douse a dog that's caught fire. The prose is challenging, shifting without punctuation or paragraph breaks from dialogue to internal monologues, but it can also be breathtaking, particularly from the sister's point of view: "I read from the kind of book that doesn't require staring-out-the-window thinking but replaces all thought with Olympic swimming pools of savage love and intrigue." For readers who like to put in the work, there are plenty of rewards.
