Lewis Robinson Selected Works

The stories in this sparkling debut collection all take place in the state of Maine—which, in the hands of this madly talented young writer, quickly comes to stand for the state we're all in when we face the moments that change our lives forever. Two young hooligans have to decide whether to help the cop who has a heart attack while he's chasing them, or to cut and run. A young man at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Is a son going to abet his truck-driver father's art larceny or not? Should an amateur fighter take on the archetypal tough guy? Can the young father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat?

With humor, edginess, an eye for human idiosyncrasy, and a nice relish for menace, Lewis Robinson shows us the lives of the wealthy and poor, the delinquent and romantic, and the so-called ordinary—in transition, at turning points, and always with universal implications. These stories are at once classic and modern, complex and accessible, and, taken together, they bring the good news that a significant, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.

Lewis Robinson’s critically acclaimed story collection Officer Friendly was described by The San Francisco Chronicle as “eleven letter-perfect stories with the keen understanding of human nature readers expect to find in works by veterans like Alice Munro.”

Now Robinson has written Water Dogs, a suspenseful, disquieting, and compulsively readable first novel that takes an unforgettable look at the delicate patchwork of a family. Bennie knows that the details of his life don’t show well. A twenty-seven-year-old college dropout with stalled ambitions, he works at an animal shelter and lives with his bullheaded older brother, Littlefield, in their old family home on Meadow Island, Maine, a house that has fallen into disrepair since their father’s untimely death several years earlier. When a massive blizzard hits the state one Saturday afternoon, Bennie, Littlefield, and a crew of roughneck war-game enthusiasts decide to play paintball at the local granite quarry. Bennie accidentally falls into a gully, landing in the hospital, and wonders if his life can get any worse. But when one of the players disappears during the storm and Littlefield becomes the main suspect in the disappearance, Bennie realizes that the game might have had much higher stakes. Then Littlefield takes off without a word of explanation, forcing Bennie to seriously question his loyalty to his enigmatic brother. With the guidance of his intrepid girlfriend, Helen, and his twin sister, Gwen, Bennie goes looking for answers, embarking on a journey that brings him closer to a truth he may not want to discover. What he finds will change his family and his life forever. Written in prose as arresting and spare as the novel’s rural Maine setting, Lewis Robinson’s Water Dogs is a marvel of modern fiction, a book rich in empathy that follows one man’s path through the uncertainties of youth and loss toward self-discovery.