A Boy and His Dog in Hell

Over the last forty-plus years, Mike Sager has made a career “finding the quotidian within the extreme, the tender amid the grotesque,” according to the author and popular Columbia Journalism School professor Sam Freedman.

A Boy and His Dog in Hell collects 19 stories that Sager, in his author’s note, calls “my milestones, pieces that have defined and distinguished my work over forty-some years of journalism—adventures, high jinks, near-death moments, and wrenching intimate encounters that have helped to shape me as a writer and as a man.”

We meet: A pair of young Puerto Rican brothers, living marginally in the slums of North Philadelphia, working the corner selling cocaine and fighting stolen pit bulldogs to the death. The members of a once-proud Latinx street gang, the V-13 from Venice, CA, have lost their fortunes in a cloud of crack smoke. A seven-foot-six-inch, Sudanese-born NBA basketball player—the first time he attempted a dunk, he broke his front teeth on the ten-foot rim. He went on to become one of the greatest shot-blockers in the history of the National Basketball Association.

We spend time with blue-collar tweakers in Hawaii; Aryan Nation troopers in Idaho; and near-fatally hip heroin addicts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We meet the Reverend Al Sharpton at a time, early in his career, when this important civil rights figure and mainstream chat show host was vilified and feared by many Americans of all races. A road trip across the country brings Sager eyeball to eyeball with a number of America’s smartest men (and one woman) and demonstrates that having a super high IQ can be as much of a handicap as an advantage. Life, it seems, can be just as challenging on either end of the bell curve. A trip across Thailand brings Sager together with dozens of American military veterans who’d decided, after the Vietnam war, that they’d rather set down roots in the Land of Smiles than return home. Life as an ex-pat: You’re home and yet you ain’t.

We attend the “Superbowl of Rodeo” with the world’s winningest professional cowboy, a deep dive into red-state values and the condition of the American Western Ideal. We meet Charlie Van Dyke, 650 pounds, a fat man in a low-fat world. Bill Hicks, a comedian destined for mainstream stardom until tragedy struck. And NBA lightning rod Kobe Bryant, who lifted the craft of basketball into compelling art . . . and so beautifully made the tricky transition to next chapter . . . before leaving the earth suddenly and way too soon.

Also included: six feature stories written during Sager’s early years at the Washington Post, where he began his career as a copy boy in 1978.

“Because Sager doesn’t put any barriers between us and his characters, and because he renders them so thoughtfully and with such compassion, readers are allowed to focus on the drama of the stories. Above all, Sager doesn’t get in the way of the story. He is not a commentator or a pundit. He doesn’t analyze, his pieces don’t have an obvious aim or thesis. His prose is so direct and unfussy, it’s almost invisible, like a camera. And yet there is a propulsion to it because in almost every sentence you’ll find a fact—that blessed newspaper training. The sentences flow with a definite rhythm, but Sager’s style is unadorned with falsity, unburdened by over-interpretation. He’s a natural storyteller. You never get the feeling he’s there just to show off, only to entertain you.” — Alex Belth, editor of EsquireClassic.com and The Stacks Reader Series

“I once described Mike Sager as “the Beat poet of American journalism.” The title is still apt. For decades, he has explored the beautiful and horrifying underbelly of American society with poignantly explicit portrayals of porn stars, swingers, druggies, movie stars, rockers and rappers, as well as stunning stories about obscure people whose lives were resonant with deep meaning—a 92-year-old man, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a 650-pound man. He became a journalistic ethnographer of American life and his generation’s heir to the work of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. His imposing body of work today is collected in more than a dozen books and eBooks, including the best sellers Scary Monsters and Super Freaks and Revenge of the Donut Boys”  — Walt Harrington, author, journalist, and past head of Journalism at the University of Illinois.