Dogwalker: Stories

Bradford constructs his stories using a jumble of absurd, ugly situations and emotionally stunted and clumsy characters. Take, for instance, "Dogs," an overlong piece of surrealism about a man who impregnates his girlfriend's pet, or "The Texas School For the Blind," a four-page fragment about a blind, deaf mute who stabs himself in the leg. When Bradford is able to create convincing characters, they're strangely moving, such as in "Bill McQuill," in which a joker with a drinking problem takes his nagging landlord hostage. Other stories make for good slapstick, like "Mollusks," in which a giant slug nearly destroys a marriage, and "Mattress," in which the narrator braves the ferocious driving of his roommate in order to claim a piece of used bedding being given away across town. The stories in this collection are weird, it's true, and some of them succeed as grotesques. "The House of Alan Matthews," for example, is a funny parody of neighborhood drug dealers that's also genuinely horrifying. But language and tone remain problematic for Bradford, who deliberately occludes the best moments of the book with banal turns of phrase.
—Kevin Greenberg

(Excerpted Review)

Publishers Weekly

Bradford's bizarre, species-crossing debut collection of 12 stories hits the mark with its singular characters and odd scenarios, its eccentricities blissfully unforced. Peopled by a cast of hybrid dog-men, cat-faced circus freaks and sweetly bemused, more-or-less ordinary humans, these tales are compact gems, at once provocative and sweet. "Mattress" chronicles the nameless narrator's quest for the eponymous bedding, showcasing the carefree, harmless ethos of a genuine slacker; the plot of "Six Dog Christmas" can be deduced from the title, yet this delicious morsel (it clocks in at under five pages) is a serious charmer. Longer and less focused, though still held together by Bradford's loopy internal logic, is the meandering "Dogs," in which a man impregnates a dog, thus initiating an unsettling series of events involving potential messiahs and a woman in an iron lung giving birth to a litter of puppies. Though Bradford plays with weighty ideas (faith, the line separating man and beast), his less-is-more style may leave some readers wishing for a thicker, meatier text to chew on. However, even the most skeptical will be charmed by his guileless narrative voice. Every story is told from the first person, and though Bradford employs several narrators, the voice throughout remains consistent. Frank, good-hearted, slightly na?ve, almost childlike in its simple chronicling of events, it will engage the reader immediately. (Aug. 24) Forecast: Bradford, an O. Henry Award winner, will attract younger readers with his particular brand of wacky weirdness. Though the jacket a closeup of a dog doesn't indicate the strange goings-on within, raves from Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallaceand David Sedaris will snag browsers. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Of the 12 stories in this first collection by O. Henry Award-winning author Bradford, seven are about dogs. The lead story, Catface, tells of a mutant family, mutant puppies, and a young man whose generosity embraces them all. Mattress recounts the humorous high jinks of buying and losing a mattress, while in South for the Winter the oddball narrator borrows his blind friend's car for a jaunt to a warmer climate. Mollusks is the goofy, far-out tale of finding a gargantuan slug in a glove compartment, and the outlandish and playful Little Rodney and Bill McQuill entertain as well. Using first-person narrative throughout, Bradford makes the bizarre seem plausible, but both characters and stories can be troubling and upsetting. Bradford peoples his tales with society's dropouts, misfits, and outcasts, burdened with a whole gamut of emotional and physical problems. Even so, he reserves a place for innocence, and the stories have an upbeat ending. For larger fiction collections.Mary Szczesiul, Roseville P.L., MI Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

If you're an admirer of David Lynch movies, you won't want to miss this surpassingly bizarre debut collection-the work of a young Virginia writer and (as it happens) filmmaker. It takes its time getting to you. A few of the 12 "stories" are little more than in-your-face fragments: "The Texas School for the Blind" and "South for the Winter," for example, seem to be ideas left insufficiently developed. But even in the fuller narratives, Bradford's unnamed first-person narrators are misfits without visible means of support or discernible moral natures-like the slacker protagonist of "Catface," who passively relates his mistreatment by a succession of grand mal-eccentric apartment mates; or the just-barely-bemused visitor to "The House of Alan Matthews," where a dope dealer keeps an acquaintance locked in a crawlspace. Stories in which Bradford gives his deranged imagination room to roam about are invariably better: a lurid cautionary tale about an intemperate loner ("Bill McQuill") who lives too close to the railroad tracks; a Harry Crews-like yarn in which a dimwitted "practitioner . . . of chainsaw tricks" meets the masochist of his dreams; and "Roslyn's Dog," a dark and perfectly controlled fable of captivity and metamorphosis. Man's best friend in fact pads confidently throughout Bradford's cartoonlike lunar landscapes-nowhere more memorably than in the collection's piece de resistance "Dogs," which begins when its narrator cheats on his girlfriend with her bitch (yes, literally), and gathers to its monstrous bosom a singing "muskrat," a pregnant woman in an iron lung, and a canine barbershop quartet, the whole coalescing into a frenzied parable of paternity and unbelongingthat's one of the most eerily original American stories to come down the pike since the heyday of Flannery O'Connor. Lovers of Lassie, Come Home should be forewarned-but more adventurous readers may find Bradford's uniquely daring and provocative stories well worth their attention. (His first film, How's Your News?, is scheduled to air on HBO this summer.)