Mark Haddon, 61, was born in Northampton and lives in Oxford. Between 1987 and 2002 he published more than a dozen children’s books, including Agent Z series, before his multimillion-dollar success with The Curious World of Christopher BooneLonglisted for the Booker in 2003. His later books include the story collection The pier fallsdescribed by the Evening Standard as “almost hellishly morbid … as if Ian McEwan had never become nice” and The porpoise (2019), which was nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize for Experimental Fiction. The protagonists of his new collection of stories, Dogs and Monstersincluding a Roman saint, the mother of a Minotaur, and a woman who escaped from a shady biotechnology facility.
How was this collection put together? Slowly and piecemeal. I had bypass surgery (2019), then brain fog, then Long Covid, which I think I’m slowly getting over. Some of the stories were written in windows in the fog, some before that. I like the idea of a 19th century short story where you just cram everything in, a contrast to the Carveresque short story, which has become a kind of orthodox model and often feels like a snippet of a larger narrative. So I tend to think in big arcs – a real beginning, middle and end – but since then I’ve had to learn to write differently, building tiny pieces in the dark without thinking about larger structures. This was the last set of big arcs!
What inspires you to write stories with so much action? One difference between what could loosely be called literary fiction and genre literature is a kind of decent avoidance of overdramatics. I always think of the sex scene in The Well of Loneliness: “And that night they did not part.” Come on! Let’s see what happens! Or Hilary Mantel’s story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which really takes off at the end. In genre novels – horror, police novels, whatever – the story would start there, wouldn’t it? Keep the camera rolling. You’re coming to the end of Claire Keegan’s Little things like this and think the drama is about to begin: Now the real difficulties will arise; Now you have a family.
