Friday's Forgotten Books: Confessions Of A Black Dog by Jason Michel

Confessions of a Black Dog

By Jason Michel

Close your eyes ... Welcome to Sam's world. A world where dreams melt into reality from the rain soaked streets of London to the ex-pat community of Bangkok. A world where ghosts from the past, evangelical cults, dog-headed psychopomps and drunken artists meet in a surreal noir story of escapism, lost souls and revenge. When is the end of the world? Where do Australians go when they die? And what is the Black Dog?

This blurb gives a fair indication of what you will encounter if you listen to the CONFESSIONS OF A BLACK DOG by JASON MICHEL which was published in 2008.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described London as being a ‘great cesspool into which the flotsam and jetsam of life are inevitably drawn’ and the same might reasonably be said of the world of TEFL teaching. A Teacher Of English as a Foreign Language can usually be described as either flotsam – perhaps a fresh faced young thing taking a break from University - or jetsam - the middle aged man with the inevitable drinking problem and enough skeletons in his closet to keep a paleontologist happy for months.

Many TEFL teachers have become writers –and vice versa- JK Rowling, James Joyce and Jason Michel. Jason – a self-confessed purveyor of pulp fictions and penny dreadfulls -is now resident in France but has tripped, tumbled and stumbled around the world getting into scrapes and encountering the weird and the frightening. This has clearly been the grist of Confessions Of A Black Dog.

Take a gander at this example:

‘Sitting down on a bench next to Sam, he surveyed his gathered
comrades. There was also a smattering of old friends, acquaintances and
hangers on scattered in and around the outside of the pub.
A skinny man with glasses leant forward and offered his hand as a
greeting. He had a big grin on his face and Chelsea tattoos on his arm.
His name was Freddie. B grinned back and pulled Freddie in for a hug. It
had been a while. B had worked together with Freddie and Wolfgang at
Rough Trade in the warehouse. He hadn’t seen Freddie for a long time as
he was now a resident of Portugal. Sam and Freddie had lived together in
the Spanish enclave of Melilla off the north coast of Morocco a couple of
years earlier. It was through Freddie that B had met Sam.
Samuel, the rolling stone.’

And on rolls that stone …
COABD is freewheeling and sprawling. Sometimes, the words tumbled out like a gang of drunks staggering out of a pub at closing time. Like a good drinking session it loses it way at limes but it always gets back on track and takes you to some smokey, pokey dives. How good does THAT sound?. And, of course, it’s very funny.

CLICK on the post header for a link to LULU where you can buy Confessions Of A Black Dog and Jason Michel’s short story collection THE WRONG MIND.