SMALL PRESS REVIEW review

Small Press Review
September 1982
Vol. 14, No. 9
Pages 8-9

LINCOLN’S DOCTOR’S DOG & Other Stories by
Richard Grayson (White Ewe Press, P.O. Box 996, Adelphi, MD 20783,
$11.95) ISBN 0-917976-13-4

Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog & Other Stories is a collection of 22 fictions by Richard Grayson, all funny, all playful and all engaged in the shift from persona to persona, from voice to voice that characterizes the wit of experimental fiction. Grayson achieves some startling effects in “A Sense of Porpoise” in which a porpoise replaces a boy’s dead father. The situation produces the pun, but also some fine speculations on the relationship of child to parent. “Why Van Johnson Believes in ESP” had the character of both parody and the play that is at the heart of new narrative technique. The complications of narrative voice become even greater, often funnier, sometimes more frightening in the autobiographical stories about growing up in New York in the late 60s and early 70s.