A Guide to Animal Behaviour

Susan Manningham teaches sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston.

There is breathtaking diversity in this collection of short stories by
Douglas Glover, who in 1990 won the coveted gold medal for fiction at
the Canadian National Magazine Awards. Glover’s narratives are
inhabited by characters who are energetic, perverse, exuberant, and
wholly memorable. The people in his stories think divergently and act in
ways that at first seem eccentric, but in fact are totally logical when
one takes into account Glover’s masterly delineation of character.

Glover’s world is wayward yet full of marvels: an 18th-century
pioneer believes he is being persecuted by witches; a born-again
Christian from Kentucky loses his memory and finds true love among the
fleshpots of Bel Air; one partner in a lesbian relationship dies of
cancer in a story that is as painful to read as it is full of enduring
and honest insight.

You never know where you are with Douglas Glover. As soon as you think
you’re on safe ground, he undermines your sense of complacency and
security—the mark of a fine writer. There is a contemplative depth in
Glover’s work, whether he is musing on the mythical Worm of Ouroboros,
the colors of Alabama’s Gulf coast, or the degradation of a once holy
man. His stories are the kind that stay permanently in the mind. They
may disturb one well past the point of uneasiness, but in spite of this
mental discomfort—or perhaps because of it—they are indelible.