Hides is a novel of family and politics that distinguishes itself through its careful intermingling of seriousness and comedy, and its surreal but eerily plausible setting.

As wildfires rage across Alberta and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility in northwestern Newfoundland called The Castle, operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. A reluctant conscript on the trip, the unnamed narrator of Hides travels out of a guilty sense of obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed in a mass shooting the year before. The novel traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships, father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.

Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.

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