These short stories throb with energy and peculiar forms of lust. Savage love is present in some form or another in these stories, but they are really asking the same as the characters in “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree”: ”How should one behave? What does it mean to be alive?”
The story opens with “The photo was taken just before all hell broke loose.” Each person in the photo is briefly described: Uncle Boris the clown, Jannik the wastrel, Daphne the family slut, etc. Then follows the description of all hell breaking loose.

My favourite was the first of the ones grouped together as Fugues, “Tristiana”. It is 1869, in Idaho Territory. ”Against the winter he had scrupled not to lay in a sufficiency before the snow dropped. The snow surprised him…buried his traps, buried his hut, his pole barn, his stock. He started by killing the lambs, stuffing their skins in the cracks between the sappy logs. Then he kilt the ewes, one by one, then he kilt the ram, then he kilt the ox and the riding mule, which was starving also. Then he kilt his wife. And then his dog, regretting of the dog more than the rest because it was a pure Tennessee Plott hound.” Black, savage, but some sort of weird love is there in the rest of the story.

“Crown of Thorns” is another story about being askew. A disturbed man lives half in and half out of reality. The ending was pure poetry.

Another set of stories are grouped into “Comedies” but comic scenes are found in the other stories too: “…the ineffable Senior Citizens Contract Bridge Club of Iona Station, a crypto-fascist anti-tax cabal, where the denizens drank Alberta vodka and accused each other of suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease while plotting, in the usual fashion of ethnic Ontarians, against artistic expression of all kinds, sexual freedom, freedom of speech and forensic archaeology,…” (from The Sun Lord and the Royal Child).

The Proustian scholar in “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is also asking what does it mean to be alive, and how should one behave. “And I thought how Proust teaches us that all love resides in anticipation, not the beloved, that love achieved is only on loan, that we are martyrs to our desires, which are endless. I had explained this to Geills between bouts of lovemaking. She said, “Is there a French word for ‘Lick my butthole and I’ll be yours for life’?”

His prose rushes forward, clauses tumbling into one another, and then the clauses pause for a breath while simple declarative sentences step forward and take charge. The stories pirouette from shocking violence to comedy to poignant tender love, and sometimes this all happens simultaneously.

It is a literary tour de force. ( )

There are many of us who have realized that the fairy tales we were told in our youth were complete lies. There are no princess waiting for us to be saved. There are no dashing princes to enchant our lives. In short there is no such thing as "happily ever after." And many of us have damaged our psyches in trying to build such a life. Douglas Glover is an excellent story teller for us who have realized a disillusionment with those simple stories, and his book Savage Love is an excellent collection of his work.

Page 11-Dancers at the Dawn

Moonlight illuminates the dancers and the whitewashed concrete bird bath by the standpipe, the coiled green garden hose, the liquid amber gum tree, and the tree nursery under the chicken-wire frame that keeps out rabbits and deer.
Phoenix Prill, the girl from the hospice, says insomnia is a symptom of a morbid and excessive fear of death.
I say, "How could any fear of death be excessive? What would be the sense of a tempered fear of death? Perhaps, like everyone else, I should look forward to death and sleep well? Do you sleep well?" I ask her.
"No," she says.

Glover is a frank and bold writer. His stories are not for the squeamish and can be difficult to read at times but if a reader wants an honest understanding into the dark elements of the human psyche, he is the perfect writer.

my complete review ( )