DOG MEN

Fired. Evicted. Friendless. Alone.

Chris has burned every bridge—but that’s okay. He’s fine on his own. A born survivor, all he needs is his hammock, his ax, a little food, and his trusty Toyota Tercel.

In the remote Canadian wilderness, he finds serenity: a life of simple pleasures and invigorating hardship. But his solitary peace is shattered when a chance encounter at a highway rest stop sets off a chain of events that will erupt into an inferno of senseless violence.

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first edition published by Swann+Bedlam
Melbourne Australia
June 2024

Dog Men is a labour of love.

From 2019 until quite recently, my best friend Christopher was living in his car in rural BC. He had an arrangement with a campground to run their hotdog stand in exchange for a trailer to live in but was fired. There were other hardships. He spent a winter sleeping on the ground, waking up covered in snow. That sort of thing. We would talk on the phone often but he would be out of cell service for long periods and sometimes I would have no way of knowing if he was ok.

One day he called me and was like "man, what do you make of this..." and told me a story about a perplexing and rather menacing encounter he had in the woods with three strange men in a pickup truck.

I took what he told me and used it as the basis for a scary story. What was supposed to be a No Country For Old Men style survival thriller rapidly spun out of control and became an increasingly occult horror novel. I wrote about 25k words over 3 weeks then emailed it to Chris in a pdf. He loved it. With his encouragement, I fleshed out the story, refined the structure, rewrote it, and sought publication. I got turned down a few times, though a couple small presses expressed some interest. Eventually, it found a home with Swann+Bedlam, a new imprint run by 2 indie authors I was familiar with and respected. It was in print for only a few months before S+B ceased operations.

Chris and I have been working for the last while to get a new edition out in the world. It's a very personal piece for both of us. Chris feels deeply implicated in it because the first 30 or so pages are something that actually happened to him at a vulnerable time in his life. I worked hard to write the fictionalized Chris as honestly as I could, not trying to flatter him but to portray him as he really is. The fictional parts of the book are constructed out of elements from both of our lives: conflicts we've had with other men, things they've said to us, memories of childhood, dreams we've had.

When Dog Men was originally published, I had lost my job of over a decade. I had worked for a very close friend who had a disability. I would see him several times a week and help him with aspects of his personal physical care, hygiene, etc that he could not handle himself because of his disability. When he died I felt lost. I had no education, no skills. All I knew how to do was help Luke bathe and use the toilet and get dressed. I'd spent an entire decade just hanging out with him. I was terrified of ending up in some miserable job under flourescent lights making minimum wage. So Dog Men, in addition to being a gift for Chris, was also my own way of confronting that fear: I would ruin my own reputation, make myself unemployable, by publishing the most egregious, awful, grotesque novel I could under my legal name so that any prospective employer, upon googling me, would find horrible things. This plan did not exactly work, although two of my bosses have read it and do not have much to say to me about it.

Dog Men is a failed attempt at ruining my own life and employment options, a tribute to my best friend's resilience, and a meditation on the horror of intra-male power structures, the way we discipline, dominate, and humiliate each other.