In Gloom, Gold

Reviewed by R.H. Ramsey (Canadian Literature # 99 – winter 1983)

The short story in recent decades has been an energetic form frequently marked by imaginative and narrative daring and by wit, in the intellectual and linguistic sense…

Harrier, by Terry Griggs, finely produced as a kind of chapbook, is one of the better works… Set in what appears to be a small village possibly on the east coast, the story follows the quest of a young girl for her grandfather, a mysterious man her grandmother could not or would not marry. Much in the story seems deliberately vague, and the apt title suggests both hunting (the search, in this case, for spiritual nourishment) and the annoyance caused by the elusiveness of the prey. The whole process verges on myth-making: by inventing various roles for her ancestor, the girl invests her own past, her life with meaning…