Cover of The Dog of the South

The Dog of the South

The narrator is Ray Midge, down-at-the-heels Southerner after his wife. "Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone." The fussbudget is assailed by tropical storms, grifters, hippies, car trouble, and candy wrappers at high speed "wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex". Leech Dr Reo Symes is a font of dubious financial schemes and fluff such as a circus "fifty-pound rat from the sewers of Paris, France. Of course it didn't really weigh fifty pounds and it wasn't your true rat and it wasn't from Paris, France, either. It was some kind of animal from South America."

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 272 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Dog of the South? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Dog of the South. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Handling Sin Shares fiction, humor, southern
  2. Ray Shares fiction, southern, southern lit
  3. Quite a Year for Plums Shares fiction, humor, southern
  4. The Nervous System Shares fiction

“People who read The Dog of the South tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother
  2. Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s: Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall
  3. Near Enemy
  4. Down the Darkest Street

“If you want more of the same (humor about relationships), start with these.”

  1. Southern Ladies and Gentlemen
  2. No Time for Sergeants
  3. We're Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle
  4. Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom

“If it was the literature that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Still Life with Woodpecker
  2. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
  3. Then We Came to the End
  4. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Chocolate-Covered Contest
  2. Candy and Me: A Girl's Tale of Life, Love, and Sugar
  3. Fix This Mess!
  4. Captain Phil Harris