[Dark Glasses contains] three or four of the best examples in all of literature of how the short story works. The weaker of the twelve stories could be dismissed on the assumption that they were included because of Hood's predilection for arranging his "pieces according to complex numerologies" that provide "a scaffolding for the imagination."… (p. 105)

Hood's strength lies in his ability to shape what he calls the "physical form" of material as diffuse as metaphysical speculation. Thus in terms of both manner and matter Hood is like the painter Alex Colville. Neither artist can rid himself "of those four or five bloody sets of metaphysical states" that Mathew Goderich (the persona for Hood's projected twelve volume prose epic) complained about: "Permanence and change; sameness and difference; being and becoming; form and matter."… Both Hood and Colville react to the same dilemma by concentrating on the spirit of...