Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.
A Parisian family that summers each year in a small village learns the hard way they have overstayed their welcome in this deeply unsettling and slippery novella.
On Sept. 1, Herman embarks on a search for his wife, Rose, and their son, who had gone to the neighboring farmhouse to pick up eggs and not returned. Never having stayed past the end of August before, he is shocked by the sudden turn in the weather from sunny and temperate to cold and rainy literally overnight, a pathetic fallacy and our first introduction to the village as a character of menacing proportions, populated by disturbing residents, all of whom slide sideways around Herman’s ever increasing anxiety in charming, yet frighteningly empty, ways. When he seeks out the village’s mayor to tell him what's going on, he meets Alfred, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who turns out to be a former Parisian who also once stayed past summer’s end. Alfred takes Herman on as a project, vowing to turn him into a local, and sets Herman on a path where he must find a way to withstand the unending gray, stormy landscape or simply melt away. As he attempts to navigate the village’s internal politics and strangely archaic rituals with Alfred’s help, he falls helplessly into its life as if tumbling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, his urgency slowly transforming to inert apathy. When he finally learns what happened to his wife and child, he ends up with more questions than answers. Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself.
Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-931883-91-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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