Dog on Fire

January 30, 2023
Svoboda (Great American Desert) delivers a lyrical Midwestern gothic. The novel opens when a woman sees her brother’s ghost (both are unnamed) in a dust storm holding a shovel, a totem from his time working as a trim digger. The brother has been dead a month now, and since then his sister has been investigating what led to him being felled by a mysterious seizure. She begins with his lover, Aphra, the last one to see him alive, and listens to Aphra’s painful life story involving a sexually abusive father. The siblings’ father, meanwhile, chalks up his son’s death to the work of aliens or the mob, or his son’s handling of depleted uranium during his time in the military. More important than the sister’s search for the truth are the many zany episodes: a séance, the auctioning of a hot tub, an attempt to douse a dog that’s caught fire. The prose is challenging, shifting without punctuation or paragraph breaks from dialogue to internal monologues, but it can also be breathtaking, particularly from the sister’s point of view: “I read from the kind of book that doesn’t require staring-out-the-window thinking but replaces all thought with Olympic swimming pools of savage love and intrigue.” For readers who like to put in the work, there are plenty of rewards.

February 15, 2023
A woman, her family, and a remote Midwestern town are all haunted by the death of her brother in Svoboda's (The Great American Desert, 2019) searing rumination on the boundaries of grief. Svoboda's unnamed narrator, a divorced woman with a teenage son, returns to her hometown following her brother's death. The siblings were close in age, which brings an intimate, unsettling element to the disturbingly murky circumstances surrounding the tragedy. Did he have a seizure? Drug overdose? Or was it murder? The answers may be found in his curious relationship with Aphra, the only named character in the novel, a grossly overweight woman with a reputation for promiscuity. Aphra claims to have been the brother's lover and now sets her sights on the woman's teenage son, stalking the family to the point of violence. Told from both the sister's and Aphra's viewpoints through a lens of menace and escalating tension, Svoboda's alternating narrative reveals how each woman copes with the depths of loneliness and heights of uncertainty in the aftermath of a sudden death.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.