The darker and edgier late stories of Alice Munro

"Too Much Happiness" is kind of a joke as a title when you consider the themes that dominate Alice Munro's fiction, particularly her late (past 10 years?) fiction - which seems darker, edgier, more malevolent that her earlier work. Theme one: the child who disappears. She's written about this in a number of stories, notably the lengthy Runaway in an earlier collection and two already in the first 5 stories in this one - Deep-Holes being a perfect example. These stories are about a child who disappears from the family life and willfully makes no attempt to contact his or her parents, ever. Sometimes (Runaway) the child is seemingly happy, healthy, ordinary - it made that story a little difficult for me to accept. Sometimes the child is obviously disturbed, as in Deep-Holes - in this case the kind of tragic personality disorder that seems to have an onset during puberty. A typical Munro runaway is a successful student who suddenly cracks, gives it all up, opts for a different life. The son (Kent) in Deep-Holes vanishes, writes home once, not seen again for 9 years - then the mom discovers him in Toronto, where he is living in dire poverty and near delusion. Reminds me of Roth's American Pastoral - but the differences are telling, in that Munro's parents are strangely cool to the child's disappearance, they make apparently no great effort to track down their lost child, to rescue them. The other Munro trope evident here is the woman confronted with the sudden appearance of violence in her life: the first story in the collection, a woman whose husband kills their three children; the fifth story, about a man drifter who terrorizes a lonely widow. These are not graphic accounts a la Joyce Carol Oates, but more interior and pyschological, from the point of view always of the woman, cool and collected. They somehow remind me of Flannery O'Connor (esp. A Good Man is Hard to Find), but the characters are icy and upright Candadians, not Southern gothics.