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Peshikan’s books: Stranger, Shadows of Invisible Dogs and Filiad

Peshikan, the author of this site, welcomes book lovers.

Stranger and Shadows of Invisible Dogs are collections of short stories. The characters in both books are unique and strange. Through their visions and memories they are trying to find the lost path in their life where the shadows “remain neither in a happy afternoon nor in their own muddled life.”


Filiad, Peshikan’s last book, is a challenging story of transcendent passion. The novel is provocative, controversial and treated from a slanted angle, through the eyes of a father—a complex person who is able to watch himself and his mind at work.

Stranger, a vision, an image born from the depths of the memory

Stranger, short stories born from a lost path in life.

The Stranger, a comet's tail, a vision, resembling an improved version of Lord Byron. An image sprouting from the depths of Peshikan's memory, serving him as a pinpoint in his search for the lost path in his life. An image of a dream born of fleeting contact with someone from the world of the others, with the character’s strangeness being the bridge between him and the others. A few “probes” into various places in the book reveal precisely this: “I thought of the phantoms that had followed me everywhere, which I had named and adopted at some point in my life. Could they really help carry me across the precipice standing between the child born in that house and me?” Here is another one: “…for a few breathless seconds, I was He – hot, smooth, and experienced. A great friend to an overly demanding little boy.


Was it not in just such a moment that I had lost my path? Perhaps back then, at barely twelve years old, I had chosen love to be my lifelong substitute for eternity. What other explanation was there”

Shadows of Invisible Dogs, journey with our wounds

Shadows of Invisible Dogs, short stories by D. Peshikan

Shadows of Invisible dogs, stories fixated on the occasional twists of thought/feeling. Peshikan’s characters are seeing the extraordinary in the mundane, there, where it may not exist. The shadows of their "own muddled life" remain simply in some "happy afternoon". The implications in his stories are not directed to the outside world or to social characteristics but the human psyche. The feeling would be vague and indefinite, abstract like in Kafka’s case, if it were not ever-present in the depths of the messages, in the easily readable secondary focus – the sullen form of the social system in which we all live. 


“While we are waiting for the new Godot, however, why do we not finally grow up? Why not look past the authoritarian backs of totalitarian or democratic fathers? Let us quietly shut our book of quotes and turn our souls, those weather-beaten gloves, to the living word, the only one that senses the irregular pulse of our human situation. It does not matter that the present situation in which we believe is not always genuine, that what we delight in is not necessarily good and that all these questions, from the beginning of time, are still awaiting their answer.”

Filiad, a novel of intrigues, grudgе, a fatal kiss

Filiad, a novel published on Amazon and Smashwords.

Filiad begins with the child’s Besovsky intrigues. An ill-fated love affair with his English and piano teacher predestines his fatherhood story. Since then, he does not like children as they remind him of his fiasco as a child. The fatal grudge against youth is soon to be put on trial by arterial fire when Blanche gives her father a fatal goodnight kiss that goes astray…What has malignantly sprung from neglect of love, swells ever more monstrous all the time but the narrator calls it nothing but—love. Filiad is a tale of anguish, both Besovsky’s and his daughter’s, and loss as real and communicable as their affair is one of dissimulation and deceit and lacks any other unequivocal message.


The author found it challenging that though many have tried so few have contrived to turn an unflinching “novelistic eye” on, let alone hold the gaze of, this so exclusively human horror. To his knowledge, no one has braved it to write from this standpoint, at least not at such soul-magnifying close range, following every wince and shiver as well as the grins and spasms, in this case, Slavic, soul—from an initial epiphany, in a work of art.
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