reading and reviewing walking horatio

“It is a privilege to be reviewed by D.F. Lewis.” Nicholas Royle.

It is. An absolute honour. Over the last years, D.F. Lewis has turned reviewing books into something like performance art, marrying criticism with literary synchronicity and real-life crossovers. The result can sometimes be stunning, infuriating, exhilarating, perplexing, and luminous all at the same time. I have had the good fortune to have had a couple of short stories reviewed by him in the past, but this is the first time he has taken his considerable talents and intellect to one of my full-length works. I am pleased that he has found something of worth in my book.

Here is his real-time review of WALKING HORATIO.

To read it via that link, you might have to click on “Leave A Comment”. But you don’t have to comment yourself. It just opens up the comments thread, where the review appeared one day at a time, over the period of his reading.

I’d just like to add my thanks not only to D.F. Lewis for taking the time to review the book in such a way, and so generously, but also to Tony Lovell for bringing the book to D.F.’s attention in the first place. During the lockdown, it’s been a genuine pleasure following the review. Thank you, both.

Here are the links to the paperback of WALKING HORATIO:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

walking horatio

One morning towards the end of September, my cousin Leo appeared at my door and handed over a brown heap of fur that had a tail at one end, a wet nose at the other, and a tongue that stuck out and quivered like a rubber carpet in an earthquake.

I wrote that sentence a long time ago. I thought they were the first words in a short story. But for some reason the character of Horatio the dog and “I”, the unnamed narrator of the piece, didn’t want to say goodbye to me. Or for that matter, me to them. I wrote what I thought was going to be the second tale of a trilogy, and that when I finished the third tale that would be the end of things. A neat little triptych of left-of-field short stories. Cool. I could put them in a collection some time in the future.

Except the third story, which would have rounded things off, never happened.

Whenever I sat down to write it, other things happened instead. And they kept happening – between other projects and amidst the general trauma of life – a chapter at a time, over the course of maybe fifteen years. Until what I had was a book, sort of by surprise.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, but it’s as close to the truth as I can explain it. There were rewrites, and trimming, and editing, and all the rest, naturally. It didn’t just spontaneously appear as a coherent narrative, perfectly set out and written (hell, nothing’s ever perfectly written, and over the course of such a long writing period there were many tricky things to deal with), but it felt like something of a gift all the same. Almost without realising it was happening, there was a book full of Horatio, and I’m very pleased about that.

We meet “I” and Horatio in the book, and they have adventures and lazy days, and the sun rises and the sun sets, and there are bones to be consumed and books to be read, and walks, plenty of walks, to be taken, and friendships and life to enjoy, or if you can’t enjoy it then to at least accept it and be okay about things, as much as you can be.

I think it’s a pretty decent book. But then maybe I would do. I'm pleased with it.

It's my hope that you'll give it a go, and that if you do then you like it too.

The book is currently available in paperback only, and stretches to just shy of 300 pages. Fingers crossed, an ebook edition will appear in the future.

Here are some links.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia