Author Mark Haddon: ‘Bodies are such a good source of drama’

Mark Haddon, 61, was born in Northampton and lives in Oxford. Between 1987 and 2002 he published more than a dozen books for children, including the Agent Z series, before his multimillion-selling success with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, longlisted for the Booker in 2003. Among his subsequent books are the story collection The Pier Falls, described by the Evening Standard as “almost hellishly morbid… as if Ian McEwan had never turned nice”, and The Porpoise (2019), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction. The protagonists in his new story collection, Dogs and Monsters, include a Roman saint, a minotaur’s mother and a woman who has run away from a shadowy bioengineering facility.How did this collection come together?
Slowly and piecemeal. I had a heart bypass [in 2019], then brain fog, then long Covid, which I think I’m getting over. Some of the stories were written in windows in the fog, some before that period. I like the 19th-century idea of a short story where you just pack everything in, a contrast to the Carveresque short story which has become a kind of orthodox model and often seems like a snippet from a larger narrative. So I tend to think in terms of big arcs – a real beginning, a real middle and a real end – but I’ve since had to learn to write in a different way, building tiny pieces in the dark without thinking about larger structures. This was the last lot of big arcs!What leads you to write stories with so much action?
One difference between what you might loosely call literary fiction and genre fiction is a kind of decorous avoidance of the overly dramatic. I always think of the sex scene in The Well of Loneliness: “And that night they were not parted.” Come on! Let’s see what happens! Or the Hilary Mantel story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which pulls away at the end. In genre fiction – horror, police procedural, whatever – that’s where the story would start, isn’t it? Keep the camera running. You get to the end of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and think the drama is about to start: now the real difficulties will happen; now you have a family.