“Beyond Historical Fiction”: A Review of Muzzle the Black Dog by Mike Cobb (2025)

 

Oftentimes, when an author finds success in a particular genre, style of writing, or “voice,” they are content to remain in that level of craft that they have worked so hard to achieve. This is understandable. There are benefits to having your growing and loyal audience know exactly what they are getting when they open one of your books. Many bestselling authors have followed this formula and found it satisfying, lucrative, and essential to their longevity.

Lucky for the readers of Mike Cobb’s historical fiction, the author of Dead Beckoning, The Devil You Knew, and You Will Know Me By My Deeds has, with his latest offering (a novella), adjusted ever so slightly, but meaningfully, both his voice and writing style. This cues to his growing audience that there is plenty more to come from this gifted craftsman and storyteller.

In interviews with me, and elsewhere, Cobb has stated he primarily follows his characters when deciding where to take the story, without doing a large amount of plotting. The central characters in Muzzle the Black Dog are perhaps not so much different than those in Cobb’s previous works, but they are certainly rougher around the edges, less verbose, and more introspective—which may account for this being a novella and not a novel.

The length is not an issue—Cobb packs just as much tension, suspense, twists and turns, and stunning reveals in Muzzle as he has in his previous books, which are each more than four hundred pages.

As we saw with Devil and Deeds, Cobb’s penchant for allowing his characters to take control of the direction of the narrative makes for excellent first-person narration, and Muzzle is no different.

Key to the different tone of Muzzle are the voices and personalities of its two main characters. Muzzle’s narrator, Jack Pate, is an ex-dentist living in a cabin in the woods (that rich old trope—at least in capable hands like Cobb’s). He is estranged from his wife and children and navigating fragmented memories of a confusing, difficult past. The inciting incident, which unfolds with the very first sentence, is the arrival of a man (who goes by multiple names, so I won’t mention any here) who knows considerably more about our lead character/narrator than he rightfully should.

The narrator invites the unexpected visitor to spend the night in his cabin. At first, I found this rather odd, until the narrator explained that he is keeping the stranger there to try to puzzle out the stranger’s reason for seeking him out and how it is that the stranger knows what he knows. This is admittedly both ballsy and brilliant.

It is also incredibly dangerous.

Thus, the cascading events of the plot are rapidly set into motion. To reveal anything about how these two men further intersect would do the writer and the writing a vast injustice beyond saying that elements of the story reminded me of Stephen King’s “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” from his anthology Four Past Midnight (one of my all-time favorite novellas). The endings are vastly different, but the tensions between the two main characters have an equally palpable grit and sweat-inducing Inevitability. So, instead of going deep into the plot, I want to focus for the remainder of this review on Cobb’s stock in trade—the weaving of Atlanta true crime into his works of fiction.

In this case, it is the series of bombings between 1996 and 1998 in the Southern United States, the most publicized of which was the Centennial Olympic Park event during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The perpetrator, who was responsible for two deaths and injuries to another 100, was Eric Rudolph, who eluded the FBI for 5 years before they finally apprehended him in 2003.

Rudolph’s brother also figures rather grotesquely into the story. If, like me, you aren’t aware of how, the answers are held in the pages of Muzzle the Dog.

Although he used it sparingly in his previous books, Cobb employs a great deal of psychological symbolism in this novella, from the title to physical objects (to the narrator’s last name, pate, meaning head, where a man living alone in the woods spends a great deal of his time). As always, he handles flashbacks with skill, giving meaning through context to the symbols as the story steadily, tensely progresses. The two main characters also engage in notable amounts of erudition and philosophy, which add considerable depth to their in-the-woods discussions without bogging down the narrative.

To close, it only remains to say that Mike Cobb continues to evolve as a writer, using his solid foundation of deep research, complex characters, deft application of literary devices, and fluid prose to expand into new realms of historical fiction and true crime interwoven with equally disturbing fictional crimes that come from the writer’s (and the characters’) fertile imaginations.

I am looking forward to what comes next.