The Cloaca

Winner of the 2012 Expozine Alternative Press Award

The stories included in Andrew Hood’s sophomore collection are beautiful, gross, funny, and personal. The Cloaca is a train wreck of awesomeness. It’s your high school gym coach, drunk and dishing dirt on all the other teachers on the crosstown bus—a stomach-turning spectacle that’ll make you laugh out loud now, feel bad later. You won’t be able to look away for an instant.

Andrew Hood is an award-winning author of short fiction, and a rad dude. His first book, Pardon our Monsters (Véhicule) received wide praise and won The Writers’ Union of Canada’s Danuta Gleed Award. Hood has lived in Montreal, Guelph, and other places, but now calls Halifax home.

“Hood finds some impossible way to marry the deadpan pessimism of Raymond Carver with the humour of South Park.” — Broken Pencil

“This collection of insightful, observant human dramas reveals both the humour and brutality of modern day life. It is also perfectly typeset to be read easily and is overall a handsome volume. I couldn’t put it down.” — Expozine Alternative Press Award jury citation

“Hood is joining the ranks of such satirists as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, whose view of human culture and behaviour always acknowledged the underside of waste and excrement.” — National Post

“Hood’s prose is workmanlike but effective; there are no pyrotechnics here, just good stories, well told.” — Quill & Quire

“Andrew Hood illuminates the concerns of his generation with fearless clarity.” — Winnipeg Review

“Andrew Hood’s narrators are cloaked versions of this bottomless well of his own imaginative, sour voice. And it’s the voice that’s on display at every turn…Some people just see more beauty in ugly things, and he is definitely one of them.” — Cult MTL