Savage Love

Douglas Glover is one of those writers Canadian readers know better than American ones do, partly because his work tends to land at the literary fiction press end rather than at major commercial houses. Savage Love is a story collection, and the title isn’t accidental.

The stories are dark in different ways. Marriages going sideways, small acts of cruelty, the kind of moments that families tend not to talk about afterward.

Glover writes in long, unspooling sentences and trusts the reader to keep up. The stories range across forms. Some are realist, some experimental, a few read almost like fables. He’s been called a writer’s writer, which usually means a smaller readership and a higher critical profile, and that fits him.

If you’ve read Steven Heighton or Lisa Moore and want something a notch stranger, Glover is worth the time.