• Home
  • Features
    • Essays
    • Interviews
  • Lifestyle
    • Fitness
    • Masculine Style
  • Reviews
    • Books
  • About
    • Contact
  • JOIN OUR VIP MAILING LIST

  • SUPPORT US ON PATREON

  • Follow CHEST On

  • Home
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Essays
  • Lifestyle
    • Masculine Style
    • Fitness
  • Reviews
    • Books
  • About
    • Contact

BOOK REVIEW | The King of Dogs

August 26, 2021
Cameron Dixon
Website | + posts

Cameron Dixon is a Catholic Husband, Father, Engineer and author of the Praxis of Man blog.

  • Cameron Dixon
    #molongui-disabled-link
    Masculinity, Morality & The Problem of Identity
  • Cameron Dixon
    #molongui-disabled-link
    BOOK REVIEW | American Muckraker
  • Cameron Dixon
    #molongui-disabled-link
    The Abolition of Man
  • Cameron Dixon
    #molongui-disabled-link
    BOOK REVIEW | Final Spin by Jocko Willink

“A Love Letter to Death & Suffering”

Set in modern-day America during a Soviet-style apocalyptic collapse, King of Dogs is an astute example of how deeply meaningful motifs are oftentimes best expressed through powerful narratives with compelling characters. Andrew Edwards proves without a doubt that modern fiction can be much more than just an entertaining story and is a highly effective medium for delivering profound truths to readers.

The novel follows the story of Grayson, an Orthodox Christian and warrior-philosopher who is equally skilled at bushcraft and guerilla warfare as he seeks to fulfill a death-bed promise to his closest friend to watch over his younger brother Phil and his wife Sarah who are expecting a child. When a violent militia group burns through the town they are held up in, Grayson is separated from his quarry and forced to go on a dangerous manhunt amidst the chaotic series of events unfolding around him. As the world continues to decline, Grayson must enter into hell on earth as he fights (physically, mentally, and spiritually) to fulfill his friend’s final request, find Phil and Sarah, and get them to safety. As one might expect, a myriad of deviants, opportunists, and criminals looking to capitalize on the anarchy seem hell-bent on getting in Grayson’s way, causing him to wrestle with his moral principles to complete his mission.

At its core, King of Dogs is a love letter to suffering, loss, pain, and death — the universal human experience. While it may be tempting to reduce the story down to a simple dystopian thriller, to do so would be to miss the depth of what the author is trying to communicate to his readers. We fear death and have a nihilistic view of pain and suffering. Andrew Edwards is trying to change that by showing how one can derive meaning and utility even in the face of profound loss.

Death and suffering are not presented as enemies in the story, at least not for Grayson. Death is an old friend to him, one he exhibits an extraordinarily intimate relationship with. He has learned to accept and live in harmony with pain and, in a truly heroic fashion, came to understand that ultimately death makes life worth living. To me, one sentence from the novel that represents the story’s thesis is: “Beyond terror resides God.” While early on it seems as though Grayson is searching desperately for Phil and Sarah, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that what he is searching for in all his pain is meaning, and for him, that meaning is God.

Grayson is a skilled tracker, and King of Dogs does a fantastic job of bringing out the symbolic patterns that shape his understanding of reality and being. For Grayson, all of life is a process of us tracking something. As he so eloquently states:

“Man was constituted as a hunter […] tracking is thus not only the supernal rudiment to all man’s survival and the fundamental superstructure of his experience of being but also the fountainhead of his highest achievements. […] God hunts man just as surely as man hunts God.”

For Grayson, life is a constant process of us searching for God in our suffering and God leaving “tracks” for us to find Him. This is just a taste of some of the profound symbolism this book has to offer.

King of Dogs has a sub-theme dealing with experiences with psychedelic drugs. In a slightly poetic fashion, reading the book will, in many ways, send the reader on their own acid trip as they are forced to confront some of the more surreal (albeit painful) aspects of reality. However, despite this, King of Dogs has a very sobering tone to it. I cannot say King of Dogs was fun to read. “Fun” would be a terribly inappropriate word to describe the experience of reading this book. This does not, however, mean it is not worth reading. The novel forces the reader to come to terms with many ugly truths about the realities of human experience, namely death, pain, loss, and suffering. The story is dark at times throughout (just as our own stories are dark many times throughout our lives) and exposes the reader to heavy content such as rape, murder, torture, and sex trafficking. While the author handles these difficult topics in a manner that is not overly grotesque or explicit, it does make the book quite heavy at times. This surrounds the story with an aura of gravitas that is not a flaw in any way. It is, however, important for anyone looking to pick up King of Dogs to know what they are getting into. This book is serious and contains serious content.

If you read this book just for a thrilling story, you are missing most of what Andrew Edwards offers his readers here. It may be tempting to simply skim over the philosophical tangents the book often goes off on but I would advise against this. This is where the true value of this book is to be found. King of Dogs is an exploration into the human psyche as it exposes some of life’s most traumatic and difficult experiences through the eyes of a man who has come to terms with the fact that existence itself is suffering. A reality that is known by all of us. Instead of being a book about despair in the face of certain pain, loss, and death, however, Edwards is offering his readers not a way out but a way forward. The novel is filled with rich philosophical and existential thoughts coming from the mind of Grayson (which in my estimation, are thoughts from the author himself on the matter of suffering). Although the story is thoroughly captivating, I view it more as a vehicle for the message Edwards is trying to communicate with his reader. As with any good story, the details become like background characters to the main narrative. They aren’t the message; they deliver the message. Don’t get me wrong, the story is captivating, but what makes it captivating to me is not the events that unfold but what they communicate to the reader. It isn’t just a matter of what happens next but how what happens next will impact and shape Grayson’s worldview and our own.

Readers who are familiar with the works of authors such as Viktor Frankl, Dostoevsky, and even contemporaries like Jordan Peterson, who have written extensively on the issue of human suffering, will find King of Dogs appealing. Although his style is markedly different from his predecessors, Andrew Edwards provides his own commentary on the problem of human suffering. One that is raw, challenging, and slightly disturbing at times but illuminated by a gripping and eerily plausible narrative.

King of Dogs is a unique novel. The story is truly compelling, with themes of survival, honor, warfare, and perseverance, and will resonate with most men. However, what is even more critical about this piece of literature is the truths it reveals about man’s inner life and how we each confront our mortality.

Life is suffering. This is true. But Andrew Edwards demonstrates that meaning can be found in the messiness of our existence. I highly recommend King of Dogs to anyone. It is a challenging book to read on a personal level as it forces the reader to confront the more terrifying aspects of existence. Still, it is an enriching and remarkably spiritual experience. One passage from the book points out:

“Death asks the question: what meaning will you make of your life before I take it from you?”

To me, this entire novel is essentially asking this question to its readers.

Grayson provides his answer, but we must provide our own.

 

 

A Short Excerpt from The King of Dogs 

Posted with the author’s permission.

“The whole desert, apportioned half to the empty blue sky and half to the empty red basin, seemed itself to confront him now with his situation. Mute perhaps, but not indifferent, the subtle geologic message transmitted from the landscape to the particular consistency of his desires, physicality and beliefs—to his raw receiving soul, was more panentheistic conspiracy than some dead material challenge. The static moment evoked in him his own responsibility and involvement. The separation of context and character was an illusion. He was a man with no vehicle and little water scraping around in the middle of a hinterland, puzzling together bits of inference and trash. He had a vision of himself going to the river: saw himself stepping between the bank reeds and into the cold deliverance of the Colorado and felt the pure extinction of this moment as his head and shoulders went slow under the surface. The rush of the water in his ears washed away all fear and despair, all the gore and toil. These tracks will be here another day, he decided.

Phil is waiting somewhere and that’s where you need to be.

He picked up his feet and marched.

And as he marched and fell into the purity of the motion his mind stilled and expanded into a familiar sequence of thoughts: that man was constituted as a hunter, and that in the very observation-postulation-testing operation that a tracking hunter makes when he comes upon tracks in the mud, here in analogue were set like gems in the firmament of existence itself the essential epistemological components of man’s logical, narrative, and scientific processes. Tracking is thus not only the supernal rudiment to all man’s survival and the fundamental superstructure of his experience of being but also the fountainhead of his highest achievements. If in the mud from which it is said both predator and prey have arisen, were inlaid the preconditions and encoding for the very structures of thought, then did it also follow that there in that maker’s clay were also inlaid the primeval constituents for love? And he thought it was so. For the essence of love is sacrifice. And perhaps if it is only through the hunting of a thing that we overtake it and gain possession such that we might later give it away, then woven into the living matrix of stone and shrub, and the flux of blood and time, the whole contingent order of being–there must be the threads of a strictly necessary integrant of pursuit: a relationship of hunted and hunter.

On the material plane, the steppes and tundra, man seems the sole creature dealing in multiple moments. He is death’s own rhetorician arguing backward and forward over moments, segment- ing time to make his provisional case. And it seemed to Grayson self-evident that if the material was contingent upon the spiritual and the etheric and that if the energies and essence of God were ontologically prior to everything he might know—to the red sand disappearing underfoot and the bones in the foot, and to terror, and to whatever sacrifices he might make to quell that terror, then it must be that in time and outside time, God hunts man just as surely as man hunts God. Chasing, eluding. And this is the way of things until one finds the other again on this or some other glittering globe.”

 

Related

andrew EdwardsCameron Dixondeathdystopiadystopiandystopian fictionfictionLife is a Training Ground for Deathnoveloriginal fictionorthodoxorthodox christianpainstrugglesufferingsurvival
Share

Books  / Reviews

Cameron Dixon
Cameron Dixon is a Catholic Husband, Father, Engineer and author of the Praxis of Man blog.

You might also like

BOOK REVIEW | Final Spin by Jocko Willink
November 7, 2021
  • Warrior Poet Society
  • SIGN UP FOR OUR VIP MAILING LIST

  • SUPPORT US ON PATREON

  • chestmagazine

    chestmagazine
    New essay, in which @tannerguzy breaks down the ri New essay, in which @tannerguzy breaks down the rite of passage he just put his son through is now live on the site.
    One of our main objectives here at Chest is to spe One of our main objectives here at Chest is to spend less time and energy lamenting the present and more on building the future. 

The subject for our latest feature - @fendevilliers - typifies this approach. He is not naive to the current state of the world, but he is focused on helping to build a better one. 

Go check out his interview, give him a follow, and appreciate the beauty, strength, and ambition of his art.
    Spirit and Science - one of the many seemingly con Spirit and Science - one of the many seemingly contradictory pairs we see in life that, upon real scrutiny and honest assessment prove to be dependent on each other in their best form. 

Check out the latest piece from @caffeineandphilosophy and learn more about the crucial and historical relationship between the two.
    Now that we’re neck deep in winter, you may be r Now that we’re neck deep in winter, you may be realizing your coat game is lacking - maybe in function, or form, or both. 

We just published an article with two coat recommendations that will not only keep you warm but also make sure you’re looking your best from the most casual to most formal situations - and everything in between.
    I took this photo of John Lovell from @warriorpoet I took this photo of John Lovell from @warriorpoetsociety before interviewing him for @chestmagazine. I wouldn’t have chosen a beach scene for John if I’d had better options — but we were in Cancun and I had to work with what was available. As soon as I edited the photo, I texted it to John with the words “Charlie Don’t Surf.” With the cigar and the palm trees and John’s look — and his Special Operations background — it immediately gave that “Apocalypse Now” vibe. As Bob Ross would say, it was a “happy accident.” ⁣
⁣
Read the interview with John at CHEST and share it wherever you can. John’s a mover and a shaker in the world right now when it comes to advocating masculinity, fighting censorship, and protecting our freedoms. ⁣
⁣
We can complain about who the mainstream media lifts up as exemplars, or we can choose who we want to elevate ourselves — and that is part of CHEST magazine’s mission. We have a Patreon if you want to help us pay the bills and produce more quality content. ⁣— @starttheworld 
⁣
#⁣chestmagazine #menwithchests #johnlovell #warriorpoet #warriorpoetsociety #charliedontsurf #apocalypsenow #portraitphotography #portrait #masculineenergy #masculinity #specialforces #cinematic #cinematicphotography #heroes #idealism #bobross #happyaccident
    New interviews and articles up @chestmagazine toda New interviews and articles up @chestmagazine today with @ryanmichler and @johnlovell_wps . Also an essay on C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man from @praxisofman as well as an essay on anger from @zebulonmccain and an article on offsetting central fatigue from @liftrunbang1.0.
    Most therapists are anti-masculinity and probably Most therapists are anti-masculinity and probably even anti-male — and the industry certainly is, as a whole. But we know a few therapists who work to help men. Dr. Shawn T. Smith is a therapist working out of Colorado, and @tannerguzy interviewed him for the latest drop of CHEST magazine. Check out the article titled, “Men Would Rather Do X, Y, and/or Z Than Go To Therapy.” Also check out Dr. Smith’s books, including “The Tactical Guide to Women,” and “The Practical Guide to Men.” 
.
Photo: Adobe Stock, Statue of Freud, Prague.
.
#freud #therapist #therapistformen #psychology #psychologist #masculinity #drshawntsmith #tacticalguidetowomen #menwillliterally
    “A gritty exploration of the struggles of everyd “A gritty exploration of the struggles of everyday Americans and the search for happiness.” @praxisofman reviewed @jockowillink ‘s new novel for CHEST magazine. The book comes out soon and you can pre-order it on Amazon now. Big thanks to @ryanmichler for getting @chestmagazine an advance copy of the book.
.
#finalspin #jockowillink #jocko #chestmagazine #novel #fiction #bookreviews #books #booksformen
    Load More... Follow on Instagram
  • Chest MagazineFollow

    Chest Magazine
    Retweet on TwitterChest Magazine Retweeted
    tannerguzyTanner Guzy@tannerguzy·
    15 Jun

    Fantastic article from ⁦@ph2t3r⁩ over at ⁦@ChestMagazine⁩ on men as culture creators. https://chestmagazine.com/2022/06/13/beyond-the-man-cave-sex-pollution-and-the-retreat-of-men-from-the-arts/

    Reply on Twitter 1537187730735583232Retweet on Twitter 15371877307355832324Like on Twitter 153718773073558323227Twitter 1537187730735583232
    Retweet on TwitterChest Magazine Retweeted
    praxisofmanCameron Dixon 🥀☠️⏳@praxisofman·
    2 Jun

    @ph2t3r wrote a great response to my latest article for @ChestMagazine.

    Although he and I come to different conclusions, I agree with much of what Jack says and the importance of his nuanced approach.

    He raised some great points. Check it out. https://twitter.com/ph2t3r/status/1532419853625065472

    Jack Donovan@ph2t3r

    My response to @praxisofman ’s essay in @ChestMagazine , which argued that you have to be good at being a man to be a good man.

    https://chestmagazine.com/2022/06/02/you-dont-have-to-be-very-good-at-being-a-man-to-be-a-good-man/

    Reply on Twitter 1532422555235143684Retweet on Twitter 15324225552351436842Like on Twitter 153242255523514368411Twitter 1532422555235143684
    Retweet on TwitterChest Magazine Retweeted
    ph2t3rJack Donovan@ph2t3r·
    2 Jun

    My response to @praxisofman ’s essay in @ChestMagazine , which argued that you have to be good at being a man to be a good man.

    https://chestmagazine.com/2022/06/02/you-dont-have-to-be-very-good-at-being-a-man-to-be-a-good-man/

    Reply on Twitter 1532419853625065472Retweet on Twitter 15324198536250654723Like on Twitter 153241985362506547211Twitter 1532419853625065472
    Retweet on TwitterChest Magazine Retweeted
    ph2t3rJack Donovan@ph2t3r·
    25 May

    In a new essay for @ChestMagazine, @praxisofman wonders if one can truly be a good man without being good at being a man.

    https://chestmagazine.com/2022/05/25/masculinity-morality-the-problem-of-identity/

    Reply on Twitter 1529480405992148992Retweet on Twitter 15294804059921489925Like on Twitter 152948040599214899212Twitter 1529480405992148992
    Retweet on TwitterChest Magazine Retweeted
    praxisofmanCameron Dixon 🥀☠️⏳@praxisofman·
    25 May

    New essay from me up on @ChestMagazine

    Check it out!

    https://chestmagazine.com/2022/05/25/masculinity-morality-the-problem-of-identity/

    Reply on Twitter 1529483939022352385Retweet on Twitter 15294839390223523851Like on Twitter 15294839390223523853Twitter 1529483939022352385
  • Follow CHEST On



  • CHEST MAGAZINE

    ABOUT
    CONTACT

     

  • Sign up for our VIP Mailing List

    Subscribe to get our latest content by email.

      We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
      Built with ConvertKit

    © Copyright Chest Productions LLC