it Reed's Dogs of Truth is a collection of 17 stories, many of them previously published in magazines and anthologies. The author explains in the book's introduction that she is a "protective pessimist" who views paranoia as a "necessary tool of the trade." Indeed, paranoia is the theme that binds the stories in Dogs of Truth.
The lead story, "Grand Opening," predicts the fall of Yankee Stadium. As Salman Rushdie and new owner Ahmed Shah duke it out for control of the UNIVERSE, a country-sized mall built on the ruins of the Yankees' home, the band plays "The Star Spangled Banner" and the world's billions watch on television.
In "Visiting the Dead," a little girl almost loses her mother to her dead grandparents. Actually, the mother is already lost, having given up years ago. If our families continue to disintegrate and our mothers keep burning out, what will happen to the children?
Agent Betsy Gallaher, aka Trinket, goes undercover in "High Rise High" to save kidnapped teachers and their pregnant wives from criminally insane high-school students. If we let students continue down their current paths of self mutilation, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and raunchy sex, we're asking for a future in which every town has a "High Rise High."
"Escape From Shark Island" features the ultimate hell in reality television, where the Family Bed is an island of no escape with everyone bed-bound 24-7. We'd better watch that crazy trend called reality television, or we could all end up in bed seven days a week around the clock with our mothers, uncles, aunts, twin sisters, infant cousins and great-great-great-grandfathers three times removed.
One of the most universal fears is death by contagious disease. Kit Reed, of course, dishes up a tale ("Precautions") in which germ-phobia is so pervasive that nobody goes outside or gets near anyone else, and home military defense systems and De-con boxes rule.
Junk that traps and kills people, soap-opera focus groups drugged by computer implants, housewives craving freedom and finding that it doesn't really exist in life: Kit Reed's Dogs of Truth finds paranoia in everything we do and everything we think.
Dark stories illuminate the soul
Dogs of Truth contains many short-story masterpieces. The ideas are wildly creative, the characters are fully fleshed and develop over the course of the stories, and Kit Reed's insight into who we are as humans is right on target.
"Visiting the Dead" is as perfect as a story gets. Here, "big trees drip gray moss like mummies unwrapping" and the water "looks like pale glass you could walk out on and the invisible horizon is just exactly where you'd disappear. If [little girl Nelly] stares at it long enough maybe she will see some person she thought was lost or gone forever, walking back into her life." Bittersweet, sad to the point of horror, featuring a mother who is so weak she can't save herself, much less save her daughter, and a child who thinks, "If she and Mommy were dead, Mommy would stop crying for good; they'd never have to worry about new clothes or getting enough to eat": This is a story of intense power.
And it's only one story of 17 powerhouses. While each story presents a twisted, original idea, each also presents characters who twist our insides. Take Agent Betsy in "High School High." An unhappy cop whose father died in the line of duty, Betsy finds her undercover life as teenage Trinket a blast. For the first time, she feels like a girl. Forget the fact that she's an adult and her lover is 17-year-old Johnny. She's going to the Tinsel Prom, and she's popular with all the girls. This is what she's always wanted. Will she do the right thing and save the kidnapped teachers from the only people who have ever made her feel this good?
In "Old Soldiers," what will Jane do for Gram, who's stuck in the Palmshine Villas nursing home? Across the hall from Gram is an old soldier who never shuts up. All day and all night, the soldier screams, "Who killed Vic? Was it you?" Our grandmas may be dressed in aqua muumuus and fluffy aqua robes, and they may spend their days basking in Rosie's boob-tube glow, but what's really happening in the Palmshine Villas where we all go to die?
