Fiction that has a distinct bang of the supernatural
The kids are mad for a bit of scaredy stuff round Halloween, but horror and fantasy fiction have their place in the adult fiction market too. So, let’s look at some fiction that has a distinct bang of the supernatural about it, just recently published or about to be.
The Many Ghosts of Donahue Byrnes, Laura McLoughlin, Bonnier, €15.99
Mia Anne Moran works in the only hotel in Ballinadrum and it’s a rambling old place, but Mia Anne is fond of it and likes her work. After the elderly owner, Donahue Byrnes, dies, the old stories that have fed the gossip mills of Ballinadrum for decades are found to be true; the hotel is haunted. Old Donahue was somehow able to keep the hotel’s rogue ghosts in check, and they include some soldiers from the WWII, a tormented bride, a young girl, an angry Vicar and a baker, but now they’re running amok.
Soon after Donahue’s death, his estranged son Cormac declares he’s selling the place. However, the ghosts are making it unsaleable. He asks Mia Anne for help – seems she has a psychic knack – and she agrees, but only if the hotel is sold as a going concern and the staff get to keep their jobs. Will the objectionable Cormac agree? And, crucially, can Anna help these ghosts finally pass over to the other side? Charming, spooky and tongue-in-cheek, it’s a great debut from a fresh new voice.
Here One Moment, Lianne Moriarty, Michael Joseph, €18.99
The author of Big Little Lies and Apples Never Fall goes all psychic in her latest novel, where an old lady on a busy airplane flight predicts how some of her fellow passengers will die. One passenger will die in an industrial accident, age 43. There’s a fatal stroke coming for another passenger at age 72, pancreatic cancer will kill another at age 66 and so on. These total strangers are sceptical but still, they end up forming a Facebook Group after their encounters with the Death Lady. When some of her predictions come true, even the hard chaws get scared. Scared enough to attempt some preventative action. But can we outrun whatever ending Fate has already decided for us?
Much of the story is narrated by the Death Lady, daughter of a famous fortune teller. How does she know what she knows? Is it possible that this is all coincidence? Moriarty has never delved into the same milieu twice in any of her novels, but even for her, this seems like a departure. And a chilling one it is, too.
Night and Day, John Connolly, Hodder and Stoughton €15.99
Being published on Halloween, which is a fitting date, there are nine short stories here concerning the supernatural and things that go bump, and then there’s a long essay about how a 1972 B-movie horror film influenced the author’s relationship with his father. The movie is a Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing caper – also starring Telly Savalas, without the lollipop! – and it wasn’t terribly well received at the time. But obviously, it has a special place in Connolly’s heart and memory.
The short stories include two focusing on a dusty old library, a private lending library, where nothing is as it seems. There’s one about an encounter with a bear and there’s one about a strange, subterranean method of dealing with old Nazi war criminals. While some are scarier than others and his personal reflections ramble a bit, Connolly never fails to entertain.
Your Own Dark Shadow, edited by Jack Fennell, Tramp Press, €16
This anthology of dark short stories is the ninth book in Tramp’s excellent Recovered Voices series, which includes two Dorothy McArdle novels, The Unforeseen and The Uninvited, blood chilling novels that should never have been forgotten. McArdle, from Dundalk (of the brewing family), was huge in her day and her writing is as fresh now as it ever was. And next week on November 8, Jack Fennell launches his third anthology by various authors, all with a slant towards the odd, the unexplainable and the supernatural. His introduction alone, describing a personal experience, would keep you awake of a dark night.
Here he has resurrected (or exhumed!) 11 stories from obscurity and he proffers a genuinely spine-chilling collection from Irish literature, including writers long lost to the tides of time and some less lost writers too. Micheál MacLiammóir has a story here, as does Eimear O’Duffy, neither of whom we’d consider obscure. But there are several writers here, who would be contemporaries of Oscar Wilde, that I’ve never heard of. Wilde wrote the odd supernatural story himself (Dorian Gray and The Canterville Ghost), and Yeats loved the Ouija board, so black tales of dark deeds must have been a thing at the time. Whatever the history, these stories are first-rate.
Haunted Tales, Adam Macqueen, Swift, €14.99
It’s a plain title for a not-so-plain book, as Macqueen presents stories he first wrote as Christmas cards to family members – I kid you not – and although he’s written crime novels and currently writes for Private Eye, to have these stories picked up and published by Swift Press is testament to his talent for the creepy, even in personal correspondences. Here, there’s a son who badgers his family on Facebook, although he’s been dead for years. There’s the local community on a remote Scots island who make sure – absolutely sure – their old folks don’t go hungry. There’s a radio broadcast back in 1908 that reveals an unwelcome voice in the background. This is an imaginative and bone-chilling collection, published just last week.
Footnotes
Last week I listed some family fun activities for Halloween. This week it’s adults only. The Gravedigger Ghostbus Tour takes you around the city’s most haunted spots and afterwards dispatches you at the iconic Gravedigger’s Pub in Glasnevin. Where else? See thegravedigger.ie for details.
Further afield, there’s the Spike Island After Dark Tour, off Cork Harbour. You’re ferried across in the dark, then make a tour of the jail while you hear about the murderers, deviants, madmen and ghosts who populated what was once the biggest prison in the world. See spikeislandcork.ie for details.