It is impossible to think about Brad Watson’s untimely death in 2020, two weeks before his 65th birthday and on the verge of retirement, without sadness. He was a good friend and the best fiction writer the University of Alabama ever produced. Watson collected a bunch of prizes, because these are given one at a time, but his five books were published over 29 years, so sadly the popular readership did not grow commensurately. Maybe now it will.
This collection, of 18 stories includes 8 from the previous collections, “Last Days of the Dog Men” and “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.” They are good choices. The story “Aliens” follows a young high school couple who get pregnant, marry, and face a dreary life on the margins until a pair of visiting aliens (perhaps) puts them into a dream state where they each get the lives they pined for separately, until they wake up.
In “Last Days,” set outside Montgomery, we see two men, now ex-husbands, living in a falling-down house with two dogs. The dogs have dignity; the men struggle. One dog, the one with self-discipline, sleeps indoors; the other, virtuous but lacking self-control, sleeps on the porch. Thus we hapless humans arrange ourselves.
Watson’s people, usually men, really try to do right but sometimes just can’t. Or if they do get into a good place, it doesn’t last. His world is an unforgiving one, it seems, with not much good luck and a price to be paid for any error.
The opening story, “Dying for Dolly,” begins with great promise. An Alabama convict hones his singing skills, writes some country songs and, upon release, gets on stage with Dolly Parton. Of course he should shun the sexy wife whose antics got him incarcerated but of course he doesn’t. The story moves from hopeful to unbearably sad in a blink.
In several stories men are divorced, usually after being unfaithful, and have perilous relationships with their sons. “Visitation,” reprinted here, is the best of these, but the theme continues in “Apology.” The protagonist is alone in the West writing perhaps to his ex, remembering painfully, even against his will, their good times and where they went wrong. He says: “Those who say they have erased their pasts, how can they truly believe it? Who would want to die such a death?”
Beyond ironic, the title story, “There is Happiness,” shows us a deranged serial killer who takes body parts as souvenirs to make a kind of Mr. Potato Head on Styrofoam. She is for a while ecstatic, but sadness creeps in as she realizes her own mortality: she had underestimated the “tenacity” of death.
Watson’s stories are earthy and lyrical; highly imagined, they sometimes partake of the supernatural and fantastic, contain heartbreaking miseries, but the writing is brilliant, sympathetic, and thrilling, not, I repeat, not, depressing.
