A Local Hanging and Other Stories

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Several of the short stories included in this collection relate back to the author’s novel Shacking Up (1980), fleshing out some of the minor characters of the larger work. Thompson describes them collectively as “Other People’s Attitudes,” new perspectives of a literary landscape already crystallized. The remaining short pieces, in a similar vein, encapsulate his observations of the lives of quiet desperation lived by most of the world’s ordinary folk, in New Brunswick as elsewhere. There are no giants here, but there is throughout the stifled consciousness of lives that could have, should have, amounted to something more. The collection is heavy of mood and somewhat bleak, but insightful and evocative.