White Buick

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Greg Hollingshead’s award-winning short-story collection is notable
for its study of human victimization. People collide and withdraw in
their attempts to understand their lives, usually wounding others in the
process; they take an existential perspective, submerging action into
fruitless analysis, trapping and lacerating themselves.

In “Under the Whip” and “In the Sixties,” Hollingshead presents
lovers plagued by confusion and instability. “The Comfort of Things As
They Are” features parents who are tortured by the baffling illness of
their young child, but prevented from taking positive action by their
own ambivalence and ignorance. “Youth and Beauty” concerns a
traveling couple befriended by an ambiguous rich man, victims and
victimizers all. The fine “Small Death” chronicles the pathetic
games of an unfaithful man. In three departures (a charming “found”
piece about a 17th-century woman accused of witchcraft, the Psycho-like
“When She Was Gone,” and the brief, stream-of-consciousness
“Secret War”) the author takes an unconventional approach to subject
and style.

More concerned with the workings of mind against mind, Hollingshead
rarely pursues descriptions of time and place, but in the gentle “Your
God Is Finished” he turns consummate family historian. The little
piece, a thin study of obsession, is a weak link in the collection.