The Box Social and Other Stories

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Exemplars of Southern Ontario Gothic, the stories in this collection
stir our imaginations with their often startling juxtapositions of the
extraordinary and the quotidian. In “The Bully,” we learn that the
narrator’s high-school teachers are “watchful as heathen deities.”
In “The Ditch: Second Reading,” this archetypal statement of
regionalism is tossed off as an aside: “It’s odd the way we talk
about glaciers in our neck of the woods, but it’s what we have instead
of Hittites and pyramids and early archaic gods and Thotmes the
Third.” The collection features “The Ditch,” a trio of stories
that offers three vastly different perspectives on a neighborhood
drainage dispute, together with some dazzling contrasts.

Unfortunately, specific dates for the stories are not provided; we are
told only that they were written in the 1940s and early 1950s. It would
be interesting to consider them in the context of Reaney’s plays and
poetry (particularly the story subtitled “A Ghost Story about the Last
Two Weeks of the Donnellys”). Nevertheless, these stories stand on
their own as masterful works of the imagination.