Alan Blum’s concerns are dramatized in the surreal narrative of his novel Somebody Nobody Anybody: When the Cows Come Home . He inverts the genre of magical realism that injects fiction and fantasy into a realistic tale as a way of showing how life needs magic, by showing alternatively that magic needs a dose of the Real to deal with life. A beleaguered professor decides to study hatred by doing research on the Anti-Hate unit of the Toronto Police Force. After becoming entangled in the clichés governing public opinion about what is inoffensive rather than meaningful the professor is himself accused and tried for a hate crime.