King the Wonder Dog
And Other Stories
The poignant short story collection King the Wonder Dog is infused with retrospective melancholy.
In Eleanor Lerman’s compelling short story collection King the Wonder Dog, free-spirited artists, musicians, and wanderers of the 1960s and 1970s manage the realities of aging through learned resilience and the sustaining love of their pets.
The stories are peopled by independent, perceptive characters who came of age during the counterculture era. Now living in New York’s outer boroughs or New Jersey, they hope to avoid spiking rents and sprawling gentrification. Their memories often flow back to a grittier, more affordable Manhattan, including the “hippie” mecca of Greenwich Village. Once known for creative chaos, cheap apartments, and “quirky” shops, the Village is now upscale and expensive.
Beyond these urban changes, the characters struggle with financial constraints and unnerving health diagnoses. They share a further common element through their integral love for dogs and cats; their pets are sources of healing, emotional resonance, and transformational motivation. These animal presences are made natural through observatory grace.
In “The Alcoholic Mariannes,” a retired office manager decides to adopt a dog to make her newfound free time more focused and enjoyable. After finding a forlorn “mutt,” her application is at first rejected because she is seventy-one; though the dog is also a senior, the rescue organization insists that it might outlive her. In “John and Pablo Meet Their Neighbors,” John is jolted back to Vietnam War–era remembrances when he receives hospital cancer treatment in Room 112. The location of the “chemo suite” is the same as John’s high draft lottery number, which would have led to his service in the Southeast Asian conflict. He recalls being a “rangy teenager” with “as much of a beard and moustache as his fine, light brown hair allowed.”
Though the stories share a sense of retrospective melancholy, there are moments of engaging humor too. When David visits a friend in upstate New York, he’s advised of the local Orthodox Jewish community’s “black coats” and “fur hats” like “he’s being warned about the habits of reckless wildlife.” Steven wears his “big bright” LGBTQ+ pin while working for a housecleaning agency; after learning that many clients find male cleaners to be threatening, he gets more jobs by offering the impression that he’s brightening homes with gay “pixie dust.”
In detailing various troubled childhoods, Greenwich Village youth, socioeconomic shifts, and the marginalization of the elderly, the stories at times hit repetitive chords. But this cohesion is also nuanced, reflecting the varied experiences of a liberated, conflicted generation. Resonant, beautiful language, as with a note of the moon’s “thin crust of light rising in the east,” arises throughout to satisfying effect.
People face the indignities and adjustments of aging in the short story collection King the Wonder Dog, about seeking surety and solace in one’s later years through bonds with animals and quiet tenacity.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
