SOURCE: "Lowry in Canada," in Malcolm Lowry, Twayne Publishers, 1972, pp. 124-45.

In the following excerpt, Costa examines thematic aspects of the three Canadian stories in Hear Us O Lord, and notes similarities between "The Forest Path into the Spring" and Henry David Thoreau's Waiden.

Three of the stories in the posthumous collection, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, have a Canadian setting. Each is self-contained, further proof that Lowry never lost the storyteller's art which first brought him to the attention of American readers in Whit Burnett's famous magazine of the best in short fiction, Story. Each of these three stories contains a metaphor that dramatizes poetically the tension between the promised land of Under the Volcano—the "Northern Paradise"—and the threat of eviction in the wake of what Lowry called in one of the stories the "suburban dementia."

Like everything he wrote, the...