HUGH HOOD`s new short-fiction collection, You`ll Catch Your Death (Porcupine`s Quill, 161 pages, $12.95 paper), is definitely not for the omithophobic, for birds appear everywhere in these stories - on ceilings in Italian cathedrals, in packing crates, in shopping malls, in lonely homes and rural Ontario barns They are not always central to his stories, but they are always there. According to the narrator of his first story, birds are "somehow God`s joke with us (not on us), " and the gentle burnout with which Hood views his birds pervades each of his stories. Hood`s characters are, for the most part, unexceptional people in circumstances that fall just this side of the absurd - but Hood`s very dry, very droll sense of humour redeems them from their ordinariness. In "Disappearing Creatures of Various Kinds," Charlie, who has never seen a hippopotamus, explains how he helped the zoo locate a lost and lovelorn hippo: "Just tried to put myself in his place. Where would you go if you were a hippopotamus and feeling sexy?" In "Deanna and the Ayatollah," a retired actress in Paris advises the Ayatollah Khomeini on how he might improve his image, and manages to conflate him most convincingly with Daffy Duck: "I think it was the blackness ... the way his eyes and his bill were wrapped in mystery, in a surround of black." Although not particularly inspired and at times verging on the pedantic, these stories are very well crafted and written with a distinctive grace and generosity.