Pardon Our Monsters Andrew Hood
Short Stories
Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
Short-listed for the 2008 QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.
Andrew Hood’s debut collection heralds a young talent with an irresistible style and merciless eye. These unapologetic stories deal with an assortment of foolish self-destructive small town anti-heroes. They are unlikely odes and elegies for human shabbiness.
A newly-wed conjures a ghost in an attempt to contact her absent husband. A seventeen year old is blackmailed into buying drugs for his English teacher. A tumescent young Blue Jay’s fan and his tumor-addled sister are swept up in the tempest of the Blue Jay’s 1989 run for the World Series. An estranged stepmother and stepson embark on a pilgrimage to the Michael Jackson trial.
Hood’s cleverly wrought lyrical prose is the perfect foil for a prevailing lack of forgiveness, which becomes the overriding monstrosity of each story. Every character wants only to be pardoned, but will not, themselves, grant it.
Pardon Our Monsters is Andrew Hood’s first book. He won the Irving Layton Award for Undergraduate Fiction at Concordia University, and his stories have appeared in Concordia’s Soliloquies and Headlight Anthology. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.
"Andrew Hood is a young (really young), driven (really driven), perceptive, under-the-skin writer. He’s the real deal, and coming on strong; this is a writer you’ll want to hitch a ride with from the outset, as the journey promises to be monumental." —Trevor Ferguson
ISBN: 978-1-55065-232-1