Rob Hood
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Hood, Robert (Maxwell) (1951- ), Australian writer and editor recognised as one of Australia’s leading horror writers. Hood has worked as (inter alia) a high school teacher, journalist and radio comedy writer and is currently Design & Publication Coordinator for the Economics Faculty at Wollongong University. He won the 1975 Canberra Times National Short Story Competition with “Orientation” and has since been nominated for two Aurealis Awards and three Ditmars. Between 1983 and 1990 Hood’s output included eight plays (two co-written with children’s writer Bill Condon). which were variously performed and published; several include supernatural elements (e.g. On Getting to the Heart of the Monster, Or the Reviewers Revenge, first performed 1983). He has also written textbooks, an opera libretto, articles and poetry, and in 1988 won the Golden Dagger Award for Mystery Stories.
Rather like the title of his story “Blurred Lines" (in which an ex-serviceman’s sense of sight disappears while his sense of hearing becomes preternaturally acute), Hood’s stories (well upwards of eighty in magazines and anthologies both in Australia and overseas, many not yet collected) characteristically mix crime, horror and sometimes sf elements; blurring genre boundaries comes naturally to him. His work is marked by a deceptively straightforward style and by an intense sense of humanity (and, at times, humour) underlying his often-bizarre horror scenarios. Hood’s awareness of metaphysics (instanced in his MA (Hons) thesis on monster imagery in the works of William Blake) also contributes to his stories a sophisticated sense of the closeness of life and death
His first story collection Daydreaming on Company Time (Five Islands Press, 1988) includes fantasy tales like the title story and crime tales as well as horror tales of dislocated psyches, all told with a quirky black sense of humour. It includes the powerful “Juggernaut” (about an inexplicable and destructive Object), as well as strong horror tales like “Last Remains’, and “Necropolis” The book was runner-up for Best Single Author Collection in the 1990 Readercon Imaginative Fiction Awards (USA).
One of Hood’s most notorious horror tales is the tightly-written “Autopsy” (Bloodsongs, Jan 1994) about a killer’s insane quest for the essence of life; it is reputed to have caused the magazine in which it appeared to be banned in Qld.
From 1996-97, Hood (in collaboration with Bill Condon) published the nine-volume Creepers series, an extravagantly excessive line of fantastic childrens’ horror novels (Hodder Headline): Ghoul Man, Freak Out!, Loco-Zombies, Slime Zone, Bone Screamers, Rat Heads, Brain Sucker (this one written entirely by Condon), Humungoid, and Feeding Frenzy.
Hood’s novel Backstreets (Hodder Headline, 1999) is effectively an urban ghost story, its plot centering on a young man Kel who wakes from a coma to find that his friend Bryce is dead, and is thereafter plagued by strange dreams, which draw him to the city’s backstreets. It is a profoundly felt work based largely on the accidental death of Hood’s stepson Luke.
In 2001 he published the well-received four-volume Shades series of young adult horror novels (Hodder Headline): Shadow Dance, Night Beast, Ancient Light and Black Sun Rising. Drawing on the mythology of ancient Egypt, the Knights Templar and more, Hood here delivered a superbly dark and gritty series about Shadow creatures waging an anti-human war.
Hood’s most recent collection Immaterial (Mirrordanse, 2002) collects fifteen tales featuring ghosts and grue in plenty, aptly demonstrating his range of concerns and effects. “An Apocalyptic Horse” is a bleak post-endtimes tale. In “Number 7”a holidaying couple encounter the legend that a double and not Rudolf Hess himself died in Spandau prison; there is the suggestion that Hess stole some of the Fuhrer’s demonic science. “Peripheral Movement in the Leaves Under an Orange Tree” is a finely judged tale of haunted leaf litter and skewed perception; “Resonance of the Flesh” concerns a ritual based on the protagonist’s theory of morphic resonance and magic, the idea that there is a hidden continuum of reality (which he dubs the ‘neomorphuum’). “Housewarming” (with Paul Collins), one of the weaker tales in the collection, concerns the revenge of a house upon a group of seven teenagers who burned it down, killing old Edith Withers and her two children. In “Rough Trade”, the gargoyle made by sculptor Max Rusch twenty years ago now seeks to take on humanity; the outcome of their Frankenstein-like relationship is affecting. “Grandma and the Girls” is a tensely macabre story of a domineering grandmother who haunts her family and is haunted by them. “Dead in the Glamour of Moonlight”, one of Hood’s best tales, features a revenant of the murdered Nicole haunting her killer, Virgil; it is simultaneously a crime/zombie story. “Maculate Conception”, in which a man suffering separation from his wife seeks to obliterate a stain on his wall which ultimately proves the result of his own suicide, is rich with Hood’s deep feeling for the protagonist’s situation. “A Place for the Dead” is equally grim, dark, and unrelenting in its concept of the New Dead (corpses who will not stay dead) and its dealing with child sexual abuse. Other tales include “Dem Bones” (supernatural revenge) “Occasional Demons” (a dead princess haunts the young Republic of future Australia) and “Nasty Little Habits” (a mother is tormented by her son’s ghost). “The Calling” evokes a cosmic being in the best spirit of Blackwood.
As editor, Hood has compiled (with Stuart Coupe and Julie Ogden), Crosstown Traffic (Five Islands Press, 1993), genre-crossing crime stories; and (with Bill Congreve) Bonescribes: Year’s Best Australian Horror 1995 (Mirrordanse, 1996)and DAIKAIJU! (edited with Robin Pen)(Agog! Press, 2004) an anthology of giant monster stories. Hood has written authoritative articles on the zombie theme in cinema, and on the Australian horror film, and is a publishing partner in Wollongong’s Agog! Press. Forthcoming projects include a zombie novel, Dead Matter; Hood has numerous new stories slated for publication in magazines, anthologies and online.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Entries on Hood appear in the following: Collins, Paul. MUP Encyclopedia of Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction (Melbourne Uni Press, 1998). pp. 91-92; Pringle, David (ed). St James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (St James Press, 1998), pp. 281-83 (entry by Steven Paulsen and Sean McMullen); Stevens, B.J. Fear Codex: Australian Encyclopedia of Dark Fantasy & Horror (Jacobyte Books CDROM, Sept 2000). Interviews include Kyla Ward’s “An Interview” which appears in Hood’s Immaterial. (Mirrordanse, 2002) and Deborah Biancotti’s “Robert Hood” at www.ideomancer.com/ft/Hood.
