On the Hunt

The unnamed narrator of Hides realizes his mother is dead by touching her. “It is not enough to say that the hand had grown cold, though it had, very cold, in fact,” he recalls, “but the veins themselves, the gentle throb of blood coursing across her papery, liver-spotted skin, seemed depreciated — flattened.” Rod Moody-Corbett’s remarkable debut is about the protective walls that go up as we age, grieve, and endure change. Throughout the novel, skin is fragile, tough, thin, smelly, “ragged and hairy,” peeled, and illusory. It is a faulty layer between the true self and the outside world. With this salient, sagging symbol, Moody-Corbett writes an unflinching portrait of male friendship as it ages.

The story begins in a moment of indecision. A middling academic in Calgary — whose rambling and florid prose reveals both his alcoholic and his literary tendencies — begrudgingly considers returning to his native Newfoundland and Labrador for an October hunting...