After All!: The Collected Stories, V

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The 17 stories collected here were all written in the early 1990s, the
last decade of Hugh Hood’s life. Always a prolific writer, Hood wrote
32 books, including novels, stories, essays, an art book, and a book of
sports journalism. Born in Toronto and educated at the University of
Toronto, the bilingual Hood taught for 30 years at the Université de
Montréal while continuing to publish on average a book each year. He
was married to painter and printmaker Noreen Mallory; the couple had
four children.

In After All!, the mood or tone of the prose varies widely, moving
easily between humour, satire, documentary, fantasy, and stories that
may disturb readers. Editor W.J. Keith notes that all the stories are
written with stylistic elegance and a playful intelligence.

In “Bit Parts,” the first story, two young adults begin to draw
closer together through sharing dreams: “The fun was in the
fantasy.” Waking and dreaming states mix and flow.

In “Assault of the Killer Volleyballs,” parents are awakened by a
sound from the attic that might have been made “by an Airedale trapped
in a bass drum.” The parents open the attic by pulling a stout cord,
only to be overwhelmed by a flood of leather balls from above. They are
killed by repeated crushings and bruisings. The pseudo-scientific
explanations offered by forensic experts make for very dry comedy.

My favourite, “Too Much Mozart,” is set in East Sequoia in the area
of California known for its giant redwood trees. Local residents are
surprised when their state university decides, in 1971, to erect a new
campus devoted entirely to music. Henceforth, music became
“inescapable.” Eventually, “uncritical Mozartolatry” and endless
repetitions of his works contribute to a chain of events that lead to
infamous mass slayings at the Burger Heaven outlet in East Sequoia.
Confronted by a police SWAT team, the dying murderer offers “Too much
Mozart” as an explanation for the killing spree.

In this, his last book, Hood plays with words, revelling in the freedom
of fantasy and mocking the norms of narrative. Readers will thoroughly
enjoy this final collection.