“GHOST DOGS: ON KILLERS AND KIN” by Andre Dubus III (W.W. Norton & Co., 278 pages, $29).
You might take up Andre Dubus III’s “Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin” with a box of tissues and a bottle of bourbon close by.
The tissues are for the times you may tear up a little, amid moments of heartbreak and the author’s painful honesty. The bourbon will pair well with the grittier passages, the gunplay and such, the men-being-men moments of which there are many.
That’s quite a range for a single book, even a collection of essays written over some 25 years and originally published in places as varied as Vice and “Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.” But this is Dubus. He’s a complex fellow and contains multitudes. He’s a sensitive soul, clearly devoted to his wife and children and drawn to the power of words on a page, “the honest labor of writing itself.” He’s also deeply scarred by the poverty of his youth and feelings of inferiority it caused; when it comes to wrestling demons, he’s usually willing to pick a fight.
All of which makes for a compelling collection. It helps, of course, that Dubus, author of such acclaimed works as the novel “House of Sand and Fog” and the memoir “Townie,” is a deft writer of deep conviction. His aim, always, is the deeper truth. His style — readable but writerly — helps, too.