Immaterial (short story collection)

In 2001 Bill Congreve approached Hood with the idea of putting together a retrospective-style collection of his works.[1] Immaterial was published in May 2002 by Congreve's publishing company MirrorDanse Books.[2]

• "An Apocalyptic Horse" – a bleak post-endtimes tale.
• "Number 7" – a holidaying couple encounter the legend that a double and not Rudolf Hess himself died in Spandau prison; there is the suggestion that Hess stole some of the Führer’s demonic science.
• "Peripheral Movement in the Leaves Under an Orange Tree" – is a finely judged tale of haunted leaf litter and skewed perception;
• "Resonance of the Flesh" – concerns a ritual based on the protagonist’s theory of morphic resonance and magic, the idea that there is a hidden continuum of reality (which he dubs the ‘neomorphuum’).
• "Housewarming" (with Paul Collins) – one of the weaker tales in the collection, concerns the revenge of a house upon a group of seven teenagers who burned it down, killing old Edith Withers and her two children.
• "Rough Trade" – the gargoyle made by sculptor Max Rusch twenty years ago now seeks to take on humanity; the outcome of their Frankenstein-like relationship is affecting.
• "Grandma and the Girls" – is a tensely macabre story of a domineering grandmother who haunts her family and is haunted by them. *"Dead in the Glamour of Moonlight”, one of Hood’s best tales, features a revenant of the murdered Nicole haunting her killer, Virgil; it is simultaneously a crime/zombie story.
• "Maculate Conception" – in which a man suffering separation from his wife seeks to obliterate a stain on his wall which ultimately proves the result of his own suicide, is rich with Hood’s deep feeling for the protagonist’s situation.
• "A Place for the Dead" – is equally grim, dark, and unrelenting in its concept of the New Dead (corpses who will not stay dead) and its dealing with child sexual abuse.
• "Dem Bones" – supernatural revenge
• "Occasional Demons" – a dead princess haunts the young Republic of future Australia
• "Nasty Little Habits" – a mother is tormented by her son’s ghost
• "The Calling" – evokes a cosmic being in the best spirit of Algernon Blackwood.