THERE IS HAPPINESS

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.