[4] He continued to write fiction throughout his teens, and in first year of high school commenced his first full-length piece, which he later described with retrospective humour as "a bad Dr Who-type scifi novel", featuring an eccentric professor with a beautiful daughter combating alien invaders and carnivorous plants.

After reading H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds he became an avid reader of science fiction, but took an interest in a wide range of literary forms.

He worked as a journalist for the Sydney suburban Liverpool Leader local newspaper and also drew an editorial cartoon on a weekly basis for the publication for close to a decade.

Press editor Cat Sparks and was Graphic Design & Editorial Officer for the Faculty of Business at the University of Wollongong until retiring in July 2015 to write full-time.

The stories vary from deeply emotional pieces to epics with a cinematic scope and tales where a supernatural origin for a haunting remains uncertain.

[11] The story "Number 7", about a couple on holiday coming across a legend suggesting Rudolf Hess survived and his double perished in Spandau prison,[9] received an honourable mention in the 2003 Aurealis awards.

[citation needed] This collection brings together all Hood's 44 ghost stories, published from 1986 to 2015, three of them written especially for the book: "After Image", "Double Speak" and a 22,000-word novella, "The Whimper".

Seen by the publisher as a "reference collection", the volume includes an introduction by World Fantasy Award-winning editor, Danel Olson, notes by the author and a bibliography that lists complete publication details, awards and commendations for each story.

[17] The Awards stated: "Peripheral Visions is an ambitious project, a veritable door-stopper of a hardback comprising nearly 800 pages and 29 years of published work.

Author Robert Hood demonstrates a dazzling breadth of treatments united under the overarching ghost story theme, writing with intelligence and insight".

When he begins to experience strange dreams and catch sight of shadowy figures, he comes to believe that Bryce is lost rather than no longer alive.

[19] His journey towards confronting his grief becomes a descent into an often nightmarish world, as he roams the streets of his city home, searching for his friend and encountering a reality beyond everyday society, of the homeless and violence that seemingly echoes his inner trauma.

While the novel is not directly autobiographical, aspects of Hood's experiences in the aftermath of the tragedy and those of others around him, were significant in forming the emotional foundations of the piece.

Receiving the proposal favourably, she assisted Hood in preparing the pitch for her marketing department and the contract was offered solely on the basis on this conceptual material.

[23] Hood's original idea for the series came from a desire to explore a supernatural concept differing from familiar and frequently used tropes such as vampires and the undead.

His Creepers series of horror tales for children, written in collaboration with Bill Condon, ran to nine volumes and was published in Australia from 1996 to 1997 by Hodder Headline.

The series includes: Ghoul Man, FreakOut!, Loco-Zombies, Slime Zone, Bone Screamers, Rat Heads, Brain Sucker (written entirely by Condon), Humungoid, and Feeding Frenzy.

[9] His essay "Man and Super-Monster: A History of Daikaiju Eiga and its Metaphorical Undercurrents", published in Borderlands #7, was nominated for the 2007 William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism.

Many of his stories contain elements of science fiction or fantasy and can be a mixture of several genres with an apparently playful sense of experimenting with typical conventions and expectations.

He has extended this sensibility into his editorial work, co-editing Crosstown Traffic, an anthology collecting stories that purposely mix crime with a number of other genres.

[6] Hood's stories characteristically mix crime, horror and sometimes sf elements; blurring genre boundaries seems to come naturally to him.

His work is marked by a deceptively straightforward style and by an intense sense of humanity (and, at times, humour) underlying his, often bizarre, horror scenarios.

Hood's awareness of metaphysics (instanced in his MA (Hons) thesis on monster imagery in the works of William Blake) also contributes to his stories a sophisticated sense of the closeness of life and death.

[9] He has suggested that his initial passion for genre writing was sparked by the works of H. G. Wells, whose mixture of optimism and pessimism for the future he believes poignantly captures the dilemma of human existence.

It is co-edited with Stuart Coupe and Julie Ogden who were editors of the Mean Streets crime fiction magazine, and includes stories by Jean Bedford, Dominic Cadden, Bill Congreve, Peter Corris, Marele Day, Garry Disher, Terry Dowling, Kerry Greenwood, Robert Hood, Jan McKemmish, Robert Wallace and Steve Wright.

A call for stories on the theme brought a surprising number and range of tales from around the world and tapped a vein of enthusiasm among writers who had been waiting for such an opportunity.

[15] Hood's tale "Escena de un Asesinato" (first published in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Postcripts #28/29: Exotic Gothic 4, ed.