Mark Haddon is perhaps best known for the best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, published in 2003 and adapted for the stage by the National Theatre (winning seven Olivier awards and a Tony award for the best play). This collection is drawn from a number of short stories written between 2017 and 2023 for different journals and assembled here, along with some newer pieces. I was attracted to the book by the newer stories, which draw on Greek myth. While not every one of them does, all of them draw inspiration in some way from other authors, and all of them share an interest in mystery, fear and a little horror – attempts by people to rationalise what is going on in the world around them, and often their failures to explain.

The Mother’s Story is a twist on the Minotaur story, with a sympathetic beast and mother. Set in a timeless world (Norwich is mentioned, although the place is not significant) where Minos reigns, Ariadne is deceived, and Theseus escapes. Daedalus and Icarus plot their escape as usual, but with an unexpected turn of events: Pasiphae is a victim of her husband’s wrath – and so is her child, the so-called Minotaur. It is difficult to work out who is in the wrong here – and what is the monster. The tale ends on a hopeful note, but only just.

D.O.G.Z. is a retelling of the story of Actaeon, torn apart by his own hunting dogs after he catches sight of the goddess Diana in the woods. Much of the story revolves around the hunting dogs themselves and the exquisite pain Actaeon feels as he is transformed into the stag and cannot make himself understood. It is a mental pain as much as a physical one. The story moves on to a brief listing of famous dogs of literature – a sort of catalogue of dogs, much like Ovid’s satirical one of his own in the Metamorphoses – but one which lists them over time. We end with Laika, the stray dog sent into space. What made this reader almost physically shudder was the matter-of-factness with which the scientists strapped Laika into the capsule: they knew exactly what they were doing and, in their very scientific way, did not care about anything other than the data. Compare with Actaeon, who by simple error of seeing something he should not, was metamorphosed, and torn apart by his own favourite dogs. ‘She and [the satellite] burn up somewhere over Mexico and are transformed into nothing more than the tiniest change in the colour of the rain falling on a single mountainside’.

The Quiet Limit of the World is a retelling of the story of Tithonus, loved by Dawn, who gets Zeus to give him immortality. But a cruel present: while Tithonus never dies, he still grows, slowly, ever slowly, old. We meet Tithonus in the hospital where he has been carried after being discovered alone in the wreckage of his suburban home some time in the present. He is unknown, astonishingly ancient, nameless, looked after by a nurse, who is puzzled by the old man’s life and how he got there. Tithonus remembers the ages he spent in Greece, Rome, the whole medieval period, through the great changes of time and ructions of war of the twentieth century – he has seen it all, and, if truth be told, he has had enough. But it is his lot to remain alive. Eventually, Zeus grants him a final prayer, and the nurse returns to find him gone – she thinks.

There are tiny little classical references which link some of the stories in this collection. Like a line of crumbs, it is fun spotting them.

The non-mythological stories are similarly mystical, unresolved, slightly disturbing. Bunker is set in a post-apocalyptic world, with an escape and an uncomfortably unresolved ending. My Old School is a horror story set in a boarding school whose pupils are as sadistic as the teachers. Bullying is the theme, but it becomes never becomes clear who is the bully and who is the bullied. The Wilderness is set in a forest where (illegal?) scientific experimentation on genetics is taking place. The experiments are more than misogynistic and lead into a kind of detective story with an escape and possibly hopeful ending. The Temptation of St. Anthony is a version of the story of the ascetic Anthony the Anchorite, confused by his own illusions of speaking to crowds and the temptations of the Devil. Comfort comes in the presence of a dog – or is it a bigger beast? St. Brides Bay is a rumination of an older woman as she recalls (or just about recalls) incidents from her life that have brought her to her present home – a stream of consciousness which might only hint at reality.

Haddon specialises in tiny unobtrusive details and rich word painting. It is deceptively simple and often disturbing. There are pinpricks of sense and passages of mist and fog – what is really going on here?

Students aged between 14 and 18 might appreciate the first three, overtly mythological chapters. They might form an interesting counterbalance and reflection on the standard versions of the myths – for what are myths for except to provoke new ideas and new ways of thinking?