Hird has always had the ability to people her stories with a vast array of characters from all walks of life. She can write from any and every point of view, male or female, adult and child, yet still retain her distinct “voice”. Once you have read a Laura Hird story, you will not mistake it for any other, and it will etch itself into your memory.

In the very first story of the collection, ‘Hope,’ actually a short novella, Hird presents us with a gay male protagonist who is dissatisfied with his own life until he meets an intriguing older woman (the Hope of the title) who offers him a chance to re-examine his own values and, possibly, his own sexual orientation. Hird’s ability to capture the gay scene and to present a binary between the character’s gradual interest in Hope and the simultaneous disaster that informs his own life is masterful. Just as the character finally finds a reason to feel, so his life becomes unraveled due to an indiscretion he has committed. It is within these parallel realities that the story finds its real tension, and, ultimately, its catastrophic conclusion.

‘Hope and Other Urban Tales’ also levels a critical eye at the way people use sex for anything but love. In one story, we are presented with a man hosting a party for his boss and his wife, while he fantasizes about raping the wife, later living out this fantasy in his own marriage bed. In yet another, a young woman wakes up next to a homeless boy she has picked up while she was drunk, only to learn of the full extent of her depravity of the night before. In another story, a father who is in despair about the death of his wife and who has to raise his young daughter alone attempts to find solace in a sexual encounter with an unknown man in a public toilet. In ‘Victims,’ (perhaps an appropriate alternate title for this collection) a young woman finds pleasure in sexually enticing a married man who is infatuated with her, taking sadistic pleasure in his humiliation to compensate for the emptiness of her own life.

As disturbing and masterful as these stories are, Hird’s greatest gift is depicting the despair of children who are on the cusp of losing their innocence. From a young boy who is trying to emulate his more worldly friend as he becomes a witness to a brutal beating, to a young girl who is humiliated in front of an older man around whom she has built a sexual fantasy, Hird depicts how children play at being adults as the truth dawns on them of what that world holds in store. A personal favourite in this collection is the final story, ‘Meat.’ Here, Hird does a stunning job of presenting the inner turmoil of a young boy who is trying to tell his father that he is gay on a “father-son” outing. The boy’s despair, coupled with his father’s disbelief, finds its dramatic focus in a lamb they accidentally hit while driving home after the disclosure. Though the symbolism is apparent, the reader does not need to be a fan of William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ to understand the full, awful impact of the boy’s actions at the end of the story and his epiphany about the loss of his youth and innocence.

While there is little that is conventionally affirming in these stories, it is the telling of the tales that offers the reader a rich array of felt emotions. Hird is a master stylist and is able to build characters who live on long after the reading. As such, these stories are the “voice” of our own postmodern generation, polyphonic in their cries of despair and a longing for love. This is not an easy book to read, but for the discerning reader, its rewards are great. And despite the seeming pessimism of her vision, these are stories of great tenderness, of pathos, humour, and of genuine caring about the condition of people in a world where values are relative, and meaning, coherence, and truth are easily lost.

Read Hird’s collection for her honesty, the wonderful skills of her craft, and for her ability to make us feel the discomfort of being human. Once again, Laura Hird has shown in ‘Hope and Other Urban Tales’ that she is one of the major talents of our time.

Zsolt Alapi was born in Budapest, Hungary and grew up in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where he now lives. He is the former editor of the little magazine, Atropos, (winner of the Pushcart Prize) and has published poetry and fiction in various magazines in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, most recently in Front and Centre. He recently published a chapbook of stories, ‘Three Stories,’ (Mercutio Press, Montreal, Quebec, 2004). Zsolt teaches at Marianopolis College and Concordia University and has completed a Ph.D. at McGill University (Montreal) on Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics. He also edited a collection of poetry and short fiction, ‘Vistas’ and has written on the poetry of Pound, Williams, and Olson. To read a selection of Zsolt’s fiction on the showcase section of this site, click here.