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Entering the consciousness of a reader is the most sacred enterprise an author can have. These stories have been collected as my Zen reflection during the past year’s COVID-19 plague. This shamanistic mental state, which the Japanese term “Mushin,” or “no mind” is close to the stream-of-consciousness technique that Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, and William Faulkner used to such success. However, it is also a form of channeling that defies definition. This is the mystical realm that creatives around the world know so well, and we worship at its altar every day we put fingers to keys or pen to paper. I want to thank readers who enjoy dark stories, as in this age of political correctness and what publishers often term “accessibility,” it is becoming more difficult for us authors, especially us authors who don’t make a lot of money from our work, to find an audience. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that if the author does make a lot of money from a dark story, he/she will get marketing to back him/her up to ride the tide of money to the bank. If you ride this wave of Gustav, and all the other characters in my collection, then thanks for that. It’s been a tough year for all of us. Bless you.
Reviewed by Joel R. Dennstedt for Readers' Favorite
“This framework of bone protruded against his olive complexion like a demon attempting to escape its elastic cage.” This impeccably written simile demonstrates the incredible level of creative intelligence and literary skill one finds in the superb collection of short stories authored by James Musgrave in Valley of the Dogs. Intelligence and skill permeate and inform each story, imbuing all with the kind of refreshing energy and interest necessary to qualify this achievement as a true renovation and celebration of an otherwise (somewhat) moribund genre of fiction. The golden era of short story writing often seems lost in a past made hazy by the high-tech sponsored emasculation of attention spans and the elevation of hyper-short, sparsely limpid flash fiction into a respectable replacement for adulation. Musgrave shows this new emperor is also without clothes. Rejoice.
Valley of the Dogs by James Musgrave does not resurrect those golden days of short story writing, but it certainly reinstates the field’s dignity and stature, even while adhering to a more concisely told tale – an understandable concession to the modern mind. What these stories lack in unduly protracted exposition is more than compensated for by their acute perfection of voice and quality of expression. Repetitively, each story reeks of editorial precision and literary skill. They are remarkable, really. Franz Kafka and George Gershwin collaborate on Broadway – with inevitably Kafkaesque results. Insanity explored from the inside makes sanity look crazy. Suicide prevention works both ways. Plots like these, so novel as to seem utterly unique, make Valley of the Dogs a collection to be savored, saved, and saluted.
