In prose so precise and beautiful it makes a reader's hair stand on end, Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. In each of these stories he captures the animal crannies of the human personality - yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Ultimately, however, people are responsible where dogs are not: "I'm told in medieval times," the narrator of the title story tells us, "animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today." Frequently portrayed as beer-guzzling, duck-shooting, wife-beating bigots, Southern white men don't catch much of a break these days. Yet in Last Days of Dog-Men , Brad Watson manages to portray this much-maligned beast with empathy and insight. Equally important, he also manages to make clear the importance of their dogs--an importance that can cut both ways. In the title story, for example, a man has an affair that's consummated in the foam-rubber pole-vault pad at the local playing field. When his wife finds out, she gets even the surest way she knows how, by having his dog put to sleep. Dogs figure prominently in all the stories in this first collection. There's Spike, the retired greyhound in the title story, who becomes the means of an angry wife's revenge on her adulterous husband; Mary, the young retriever who is part of the "baggage" left to a husband after a bitter divorce in "The Retreat" ; and the nameless stray who dies in Sam's front yard in "The Wake." None of this would work if the author were not especially good at depicting dog behavior; none of the animals are sentimentalized, except occasionally by the characters. Instead, they go about in their own way, true to dog nature, sometimes companions, and sometimes displaying violence that mirrors human brutality. This offbeat collection shows talent. Mary Ellen Quinn A powerful debut collection of eight stories (two previously published in Story magazine) that are linked thematically: They're all about man and dog, though not in any sappy sense, and with no cute anthropomorphizing. In ``Bill,'' an octogenarian feels closer to her dying poodle than to her own family, and cooks up a grand feast the night before he's put to sleep; in ``Agnes of Bob,'' a childless widow realizes that her husband cared more about his dog, Bob, than about her, and the dog's presence reminds her of the emptiness in her marriage; in ``A Blessing,'' a pregnant woman is disabused of any cute notions about dogs when a trip to the country to buy one ends with an act of brutality. No sentimentality mars these gritty narratives. ``The Wake'' is a wildly implausible piece about a bachelor whose ex- girlfriend returns to him in a box via UPS. He's more concerned with the dead dog now rotting under his house than with her, his obsession offering a deliberately unsubtle correlative to a failed relationship. ``Seeing Eye,'' a vignette about a dog working for a blind man, compares its present life of responsibility to its former life roaming free on a farm. The full resonance of one of Watson's dominant themes (men-as-dogs, elemental in their needs, faithless in their couplings) emerges in the three best stories. ``The Retreat'' finds a few soon-to-be divorced men hiding out in the country, drinking, hunting, sloughing off responsibility. ``Kindred Spirits'' layers the metaphorical relationships in its story-within-a-story about a dog tracking a wild boar in the Florida swamp. The tale turns into a not very subtle parallel to the narrator's present cuckolding by his business partner. The title piece is an elegy to a dog-like life of wildness, freedom, animalism no longer available to men. Watson's muscular prose stands shoulder to shoulder with the best cracker realists, from Faulkner to Larry Brown. (Regional author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "His people and dogs―those wonderful dogs!―come alive with honest, thrumming energy." ― The New York Times Book Review "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts." ― New York Newsday "A sad, beautiful meditation on love, loss, and dogs…. Watson’s best writing is full of an unusual sort of lugubrious humor and depth." ― Los Angeles Times "The dogs are not pets so much as fully realized characters, the equals – sometimes the betters – of the men and women stirring up today’s Deep South. Watson writes with surprising emotional force." ― Amy Hempl, Elle "[This work ushers Watson into] a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford." ― The State , Columbia, South Carolina "Crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humo