Naughty Boys.Dirty Secrets.Mad Dogs. In the Eriksson family, childhood is a shocking experience, full of crude and disturbing rites of passage. It all started with Askild the Crackpot, chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp: he is a painter, a murderer and a thief. His son, Niels Jug Ears Junior, is born in an outhouse, wins respect by kicking other boys in the balls, and uses dynamite to blow up the privy when his father sells his cherished coin collection. And his son, Asger the Liar, collects stories about his shipwrecked family which are always exciting though not entirely true. He is haunted by the time he spent hidden in the space under the stairs with his fat aunt, aka the Little Bitch. He has a confession to make and a buried treasure to find. Unable to banish Doghead, a horror from his childhood, to the shadow realm, he reveals the very bad deeds children can do to push his family story forward, past a point of no return. Doghead is a richly imaginative farcical tragedy; a witty saga of three generations of wild Eriksson men. It touches on chilling themes concentration camps, child abuse, alcoholism, rape yet warmly celebrates the stories that hold families together. |