SOURCE: "Horsey Comedy in the Fiction of Sinclair Ross," in From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross, edited by John Moss, University of Ottawa Press, 1992, pp. 67-80.

In the following essay, Carpenter offers an overview of the critical reaction to Ross's short fiction and notes the comic elements in eight of his stories.

I began reading Sinclair Ross's work around 1970, a bit before the publication of his last story, "The Flowers That Killed Him" (1972). At the time there seemed to be a hunt in progress to find our cultural heroes, who in turn would articulate for us that elusive thing called "The Canadian Identity." The word was out: return to your roots, scour the countryside, haul those skeletons out of the closet. The grimmer the better. As a graduate student in search of a thesis, I canvassed the bookshelves in search of the most...