The first story, “Dimensions,’’ begins with a young woman taking a grueling succession of bus rides to visit her husband in a mental institution. Paranoid, controlling, and increasingly violent in their marriage, he had retaliated when she found brief refuge with a woman friend by killing their two children.
Totally bereft, she finds pitiful hope in letters he writes from the hospital insisting that, though dead, the children are still with him. Hope does not redeem horror; horror contaminates it.
In “Free Radicals,’’ a madman erupts into the house of a widow stricken by incurable cancer. He shows her a photograph of his parents and sister, whom he has just murdered, bloodily, for some perceived offense. She causes him to flee by out-horrifying him with the claim that she had poisoned a woman who stole her husband. She was no innocent making a clever escape, though: It was she who had stolen husband from wife, destroying a whole life of trusting partnership.
In “Wenlock Edge,’’ a student is encouraged by her roommate to have dinner with her lover. He is a rich old man who makes her strip, sit naked during the meal and, still naked, read to him from A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad’’ before sending her home, intact yet polluted. She takes revenge: not on him nor the roommate but on a middle-aged cousin who had befriended her. There is a reason, but it’s almost irrelevant. The point is that pollution spreads inexorably.
“Child’s Play’’ tells of the cruelty of two young girls toward a mentally handicapped girl who trails after them at camp. Munro writes it retrospectively when the two are old and have gone utterly different ways - one becoming a conventional housewife, the other a free-spirited writer. At the end we learn of their girlhood crime. Much of the story displays Munro’s usual skill and complexity, though the crime, foreseen by the reader, seems forced and gratuitous.
