The Cock's Egg

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson University.

A cock’s egg is a seeming impossibility, a contradiction, somewhat
like the situation created by the clash of cultures in these stories
about Canadian aid workers in Zaire. Nixon’s writing shows a strong
sense of place and local color, often with menacing overtones—the heat
and sweat, the army ants who chew their way through houses and rabbits,
the strange food and palm wine, the hippo that bites a child in half,
the witchcraft, the ghost of a dead woman that haunts a Canadian woman.
The stories deal with the relationships between the Canadians and the
locals (where misunderstandings are constant) and the relationships of
the Canadians with each other. The dislocation and foreign setting
brings out the worst in some of the aid workers, and relationships often
deteriorate. These gripping stories transport the reader right into
another world, where the unusual and the unexpected become the norm.