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WORK TITLE: The Dead House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/9/1974
WEBSITE: http://billyocallaghan.ie/en/
CITY: County Cork
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY: Irish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 9, 1974, in Cork, Ireland.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Cork County Libraries, Ireland, writer-in-residence, 2016.
AWARDS:George A. Birmingham Award; Lunch Hour Stories Prize; Molly Keane Creative Writing Award; Sean O’Faolain Award; Francis MacManus Award, RTE Radio 1; Faulkner/Wisdom Award; Glimmer Train Prize; Writing Spirit Award; Bursary Award for Literature, Arts Council of Ireland, 2010, and Born Gais Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year, 2013, both for “The Boatman;” Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award, for The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind.
WRITINGS
Editor of Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers, Cork City Libraries (Cork, Ireland), 2014. Contributor of stories to publications, including Bliza, Confrontation, Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review, Kyoto Journal, Southern Review, and Chattahoochee Review, and to RTE Radio.
SIDELIGHTS
Billy O’Callaghan is an Irish writer. His work has appeared on RTE Radio and in publications, including Bliza, Confrontation, Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review, Kyoto Journal, Southern Review, and Chattahoochee Review. He has published both collections of short stories and novels. In an article he wrote on the Writing.ie website, O’Callaghan stated: “Novels are unwieldy; short stories make me happy, whether they sell or not. They are what I want to write, and that is enough.”
The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind
In the same article on the Writing.ie website, O’Callaghan discussed the title story in his 2013 collection, The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind: And Other Stories. He stated: “‘The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind’ is a story about a young man who returns to his island home after years of self-imposed exile to see again the child he long ago abandoned. It is about more than that, but this is what lives at its core. I have no idea where the title came from, it seemed to just emerge as the story was being written, and I loved it instantly, from the resonance of the words when spoken aloud, to their shape when spread out on a page.” Other stories in the collection include “We Are Not Made of Stone,” “Icebergs,” and “Keep Well to Seaward.”
A critic on the Dactyl website commented: “Each story in this collection invites readers into the inner torments of its characters. I could not race through these stories, nor did I want to. When I finished each one, I went back to the beginning and read the story again, only to discover moments of lightness, moments when a character turned away from a choice that might have led down a different path, or moments when a character settled for what was and gave up on what might have been.” The critic concluded: “This is writing at its finest.” A contributor to the Writerful Books website noted that the book contained “masterfully written short stories.”
The Dead House
O’Callaghan’s first novel is The Dead House: … The Past Holds Constant Sway. It was released in the U.S. as The Dead House: A Novel. In another article he wrote on the Writing.ie website, O’Callaghan stated: “It’s a ghost story. It is, of course, other things too: a story of love and friendship, a study of isolation and the power of suggestion on an increasingly fragile artistic mind, and even a paean of sorts to West Cork’s wild and often menacing majesty. But it is, nevertheless, a ghost story.” O’Callaghan added: “The Dead House is a first-person narrative, and is therefore inevitably reflective, too, and the bulk of the story unfurls in relatively linear fashion (not, I admit, an approach to which I’ve always adhered) because I wanted it to have the sense of a story being told, almost being confessed.” The narrator, Michael Simmons, recalls a strange event that happened nearly a decade earlier at the recently-remodeled home of his client, Maggie Turner, an artist.
In an interview with Lenny Picker, contributor to Publishers Weekly, O’Callaghan discussed his inspirations for the book. He stated: “Over the years, I’ve heard all kinds of yarns about Ouija boards and the dangers involved in dabbling with forces beyond our understanding. Also, in Ireland we are an odd mix of strict Catholicism underlaid with some lingering pagan concessions.”
Sarah Gilmartin, critic on the Irish Times Online, remarked: “Despite the narrator Mike’s efforts to ramp up the chill factor, The Dead House rarely engages.” Gilmartin suggested that the story was “told in a naturalistic style that reads at times like clunky memoir—think Michael Harding without the charming detail.” Gilmartin continued: “The horrors themselves are compelling enough. … But as The Master tells his tale, readers must suspend disbelief in a novel that is supremely naturalistic in other respects.” Gilmartin concluded: “Hailed as a master of understatement for his short fiction, this quality is lacking in his debut novel. The Dead House is a triumph of the obvious over the artistic.” Other assessments of the book were more favorable. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly described The Dead House as “chilling, beautifully written.” The reviewer concluded: “Fans of psychological thrillers with a ghostly undercurrent will be richly rewarded.” Writing on the Wild Geese website, Claire Fullerton commented: “In a first-person voice unlike any other I’ve come across, O’Callaghan gifts us with a story that unfolds in just the way you’d want to hear it by the fireside: it is confessional, it is insightful, it is no-nonsense and direct, yet wields evocative words slipped in so seamlessly that the reader is pulled into the fantastic story in cresting waves.” A contributor to the Caffeinated Reviewer website remarked: “The Dead House was an atmospheric debut, delivering a gripping psychological thriller that will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2018, review of The Dead House: A Novel, p. 49; March 19, 2018, Lenny Picker, author interview, p. 53.
ONLINE
Billy O’Callaghan website, http://billyocallaghan.ie/ (August 7, 2018).
Caffeinated Reviewer, https://caffeinatedbookreviewer.com/ (May 3, 2018), review of The Dead House.
Dactyl, https://dactylreview.com/ (October 10, 2016), review of The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind: And Other Stories.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com (November 9, 2013), Kevin Breathnach, review of The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind; (May 20, 2017), Sarah Gilmartin, review of The Dead House.
Wild Geese, http://thewildgeese.irish/ (June 21, 2017), Claire Fullerton, review of The Dead House.
Writerful Books, http://writerfulbooks.com/ (July 15, 2018), review of The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind.
Writing.ie, https://www.writing.ie/ (March 27, 2014), article by author; (May 15, 2017), article by author.
THE AUTHOR
Billy O'Callaghan
Photo courtesy of John Minihan.
Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: ‘In Exile’ (2008) and ‘In Too Deep’ (2009), both published by Mercier Press, and ‘The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind’ (2013) published by New Island Books, which won a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award and which is forthcoming in a Chinese translation from CITIC Press in the summer of 2017.
He has also compiled a non-fiction book, entitled: ‘Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers’, which was published, in April 2014, by Cork City Libraries as part of their Occasional Series.
His first novel, ‘The Dead House’, will be published by Brandon Books, an imprint of O’Brien Press, in May 2017, and later in the year a novella, ‘A Death in the Family’, will appear as a Ploughshares Solo.
A recipient of the 2013 Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year, and a 2010 Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award for Literature, his story, ‘The Boatman’ was recently shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous other honours, including the George A. Birmingham Award, the Lunch Hour Stories Prize, the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, the Sean O’Faolain Award, the RTE Radio 1 Francis MacManus Award, the Faulkner/Wisdom Award, the Glimmer Train Prize and the Writing Spirit Award. He was also short-listed four times for the RTÉ Radio 1 P.J. O’Connor Award for Drama. He also served as the 2016 Writer-in-Residence for the Cork County Libraries.
His stories have been broadcast nationally on RTÉ Radio’s ‘The Book on One’, Sunday Miscellany and the Francis MacManus Awards series, and have appeared in more than 100 magazines and literary journals around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, the Emerson Review, the Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Los Angeles Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Per Contra, Salamander, Southeast Review, Southword, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Versal, & Yuan Yang – a journal of Hong Kong and International Writing.
‘O’Callaghan writes evocatively of a way of life that has become memory rather than reality… He demonstrates an affinity with people and place which is tender, but never trite, and invariably rewards the reader with a surprising twist.’ – The Irish Times
QUOTED: "It’s a ghost story. It is, of course, other things too: a story of love and friendship, a study of isolation and the power of suggestion on an increasingly fragile artistic mind, and even a paean of sorts to West Cork’s wild and often menacing majesty. But it is, nevertheless, a ghost story."
"The Dead House is a first-person narrative, and is therefore inevitably reflective, too, and the bulk of the story unfurls in relatively linear fashion (not, I admit, an approach to which I’ve always adhered) because I wanted it to have the sense of a story being told, almost being confessed."
A Ghost Story: The Dead House by Billy O’Callaghan
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Billy O'Callaghan © 15 May 2017.
Posted in the Magazine ( · General Fiction · Interviews ).
At the beginning of May, O’Brien Press, under their Brandon imprint, published my new book (and, in fact, my first novel, after three collections of short stories), The Dead House. It’s a ghost story. It is, of course, other things too: a story of love and friendship, a study of isolation and the power of suggestion on an increasingly fragile artistic mind, and even a paean of sorts to West Cork’s wild and often menacing majesty. But it is, nevertheless, a ghost story.
Since it has come out, I’ve been asked by a quite few people if such a label bothers or offends me, and others have expressed surprise at the fact that I have written this kind of book, with subject matter so apparently different from that which I usually mine for my short stories. On one level I can understand the surprise, but on reflection it is perhaps less of a stretch than it might at first seem. My stories usually strive for stark realism and tend to favour introspection and contemplation, seeking to understand the flaws that mark people out as human and finding ways of coping with things like loss and regret. The Dead House is a first-person narrative, and is therefore inevitably reflective, too, and the bulk of the story unfurls in relatively linear fashion (not, I admit, an approach to which I’ve always adhered) because I wanted it to have the sense of a story being told, almost being confessed. Supernatural colouring aside, it concerns itself with relatively familiar themes, and as for realism, I took the approach that this, like beauty, is in the eyes, heart and mind of the beholder, and that we all, as characters, get to set the distance of our own walls.
And with regard to the label: ghost story – the furthest thing in the world I could ever possibly take is offence. Long before I ever dreamed of even attempting to write, I was a voracious reader and listener. Stories were everything to me. In haunting my local library, some books moved me more than others, and some etched themselves so deeply that I closed the book on them knowing that nothing would ever be quite the same for me again. I never cared what boxes people built for Lonesome Dove or Dandelion Wine or Treasure Island, Murder On The Orient Express or The Masque of the Red Death. Put Maigret or Philip Marlowe in a box and the lock grows instantly obsolete.
Years of writing short stories has an effect. You submit to magazines, and unless you are one of the very lucky few who hit big straight out of the gate, you wrestle with rejection, feast on morsels and conjure endlessly inventive delusions in order to keep going. Over time I accumulated some decent publication credits, I began cracking a few shortlists and won the occasional prize, and the more work I put in, the deeper my stories seemed to run. And eventually I started to realise how arbitrary the whole business can be, and because the only thing I could control is what went down on the page, getting the story and the sentences right became the achievement. Now, first and foremost, I write to please myself. That came as a small revelation but an important one.
The Dead House was a story I carried around in my head for decades, long before I ever seriously thought of writing as something I could possibly do. But the first few passes at getting it down didn’t work. Even when I figured out how the story would have to be told, and who should do the telling, it had a hole the size of the world at its heart that I couldn’t begin to explain, much less fill. And then, in August of 2011, while travelling around the Beara Peninsula, I found what was missing. I hadn’t even been thinking about the story when the whole thing came together for me. It was a hot day and I was driving with the windows down and the sea on my left side was gleaming in a million ways clear to the horizon, and then suddenly, and just for a fraction of a second, something shifted and the air darkened. And that was all it took. That part of West Cork is laden in myth, and the sense of the ancient being everywhere, layered into every surface, as well as the weight and – to misappropriate Yeats – slightly terrible beauty of the landscape, and also the immensity of the solitude, the feeling of being so small against the eternal spread of rock, fields, sea and sky, gave me in an instant everything that my story had been missing.
Even when I knew what I was doing, though, I didn’t at first realise that I was writing a novel. What I thought might have been a long short story, and then a novella, kept on going. I had the bulk of it written in a year, and over the two or three that followed I poured back over it with scalpel slashes and rewrites, and even on days of struggle I don’t think I was ever anything but happy because I’d lived and breathed the story for so long before setting down so much as a word, I knew the characters the way I know my own family. The fact that it had to live a couple of years more in a drawer, gathering dust, is a story in itself, and one for another day, but the world turns in its own time, and my good fortune was to fall into the hands of the O’Brien Press staff, who worked hard to coax it into the beautiful shape that is currently lining bookshop shelves the length and breadth of the country.
Call The Dead House a ghost story, if you wish. Squeeze it into any box you like. I don’t much care, because it’s exactly the story I set out to write and the one I want it to be. And that’s as much as I can ask of it.
(c) Billy O’Callaghan
About The Dead House:
Attempting to rebuild her life after a violent relationship, Maggie Turner, a successful young artist, moves from London to Allihies and buys an ancient abandoned cottage. Keen to concentrate on her art, she is captivated by the wild beauty of her surroundings.
After renovations, she hosts a house-warming weekend for friends. A drunken game with a Ouija board briefly descends into something more sinister, as Maggie apparently channels a spirit who refers to himself simply as ‘The Master’. The others are visibly shaken, but the day after the whole thing is easily dismissed as the combination of suggestion and alcohol.
Maggie immerses herself in her painting, but the work devolves, day by day, until her style is no longer recognisable. She glimpses things, hears voices, finds herself drawn to certain areas: a stone circle in the nearby hills, the reefs at the west end of the beach behind her home … A compelling modern ghost story from a supremely talented writer.
Order your copy online here.
QUOTED: "Novels are unwieldy; short stories make me happy, whether they sell or not. They are what I want to write, and that is enough."
"The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind is a story about a young man who returns to his island home after years of self-imposed exile to see again the child he long ago abandoned. It is about more than that, but this is what lives at its core. I have no idea where the title came from, it seemed to just emerge as the story was being written, and I loved it instantly, from the resonance of the words when spoken aloud, to their shape when spread out on a page."
The Writing Process: Billy O’Callaghan
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Billy O'Callaghan © 27 March 2014.
Posted in the Magazine ( · Anthology · Interviews ).
I love short stories and can’t go a day without reading at least one. My shelves are crammed with collections that I’ve been hoarding since my teens, books by household names alongside translated volumes by writers considered obscure even in their native language. I have also been writing stories, in serious fashion, for probably the past fifteen years. In that time, I’ve suffered a huge amount of rejection, though I’ve enjoyed enough morsels of success – the vital encouragement of a publication here, a prize or short-listing there – to keep me biting.
Mercier Press published my second collection, In Too Deep, in the summer of 2009 (they’d also published my first collection, In Exile, a year or so earlier), and while it was reasonably well received by the few critics who bothered to give it a look, its sales figures were distinctly unremarkable. And then the whispers started: “Short Stories don’t sell. You need to write a novel.” Everywhere I went, and from everyone I met, I got the same line: novel, novel, novel.
They were right. Sort of. Short stories don’t sell. At least, not collections. At least, not collections by writers whose names don’t begin with Stephen and end in King. I was one of the lucky ones in that I’d had the books published at all, that I’d had not just one shot at the title but two. But now it was time to get real, grow up, knuckle down and get to work on the novel.
I listened, but only because I had an idea for a novel already in mind. I’d written a longish short story and published it in the U.S., but months later I still couldn’t stop thinking about the characters, a middle-aged New York couple, both married to other people, who’d been catching the subway twice a month for decades to Coney Island, the line’s last stop, for their illicit trysts. I kept seeing them, kept thinking about their lives, their backgrounds, their needs and desires. And finally, just to clear my head, I began writing about them again.
New Island Editorial Director Eoin Purcell (left) & winner Billy O'Callaghan
New Island Editorial Director Eoin Purcell (left) & Billy O’Callaghan, winner of the Irish Book Awards Writing.ie Short Story of the Year.
Four years later, I am still writing about them. On and off. Mostly off. The story is done, but there are still a lot of edges that need rounding. The problem, the lovely problem, is that I keep putting the manuscript aside to work on new ideas. After so many years of writing nothing but stories, I think my mind has become attuned to both their shape and their call. Novels are unwieldy; short stories make me happy, whether they sell or not. They are what I want to write, and that is enough.
Then, two years ago last September, I received an email from Eoin Purcell, Commissioning Editor with New Island Press, asking if I was working on anything new. I replied that I had a novel on the go and that he was welcome to give it a read, though it wasn’t finished. His response staggered and thrilled me. Actually, he said, he was hoping that I might have a new collection of stories taking shape. Those words were music to my heart.
The request could not have come at a better time. I was suffering a crisis of confidence, I think. Certainly, I was struggling for a direction. Novels require such commitment, and mine was proving a heavy burden to haul around. They stretch to forever and, for someone who happens to be insecure about every laid sentence, they can bring on an acute sense of hopelessness. A story might take a few weeks, even a few months, to finish, but at least an end is always more or less in sight. Its horizons feel within reach.
With that one email, I caught the breath of freedom.
I began sifting through my stockpile, and found, after discarding several, that I had a nice core of a half-dozen stories, five of which had been already published in magazines and journals in the United States. Additionally, I had two more unfinished stories that I felt good about, and ideas for a third, and possibly a forth, slowly fermenting.
I suppose we write about the things that trouble us most deeply, and our state of mind really does permeate our work. I didn’t have to consciously search for uniting themes; certain shared notes were immediately obvious. All, in their way, were about dealing with loss, about picking up the broken pieces and moving on. About regret, yes, and guilt, but also about survival, and the ability to endure. And nowhere were these themes more clearly defined than in a story that I knew immediately would give the collection its title. The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind is a story about a young man who returns to his island home after years of self-imposed exile to see again the child he long ago abandoned. It is about more than that, but this is what lives at its core. I have no idea where the title came from, it seemed to just emerge as the story was being written, and I loved it instantly, from the resonance of the words when spoken aloud, to their shape when spread out on a page.
With those six finished and two unfinished stories, I already had the bulk of the collection before I even realised I was writing one. By the time I finally signed the contract for the book, a year or so later, I had twelve stories ready to go. Then, during the early stages of the editing process, a thirteenth story reared its head. Keep Well to Seaward, which takes its name from a line in Homer’s The Odyssey, was a very personal story that I worked on over an intense four-month period between December and March. I’d already delivered the finished manuscript to New Island, but once I’d finished it I knew that it was the final piece of the puzzle for me as far as the collection was concerned.
It takes me a long time to write a story. Longer, it seems, with each passing year. Ideas tend to overtake me like shadows, and need the space of weeks or even months to solidify. The reason I write at all is to better understand the story that has invaded my mind, and so I work on it, over and over, until I have heard all it needs to say. Listening is critical. I’ve learned that I can’t force the process, or rush it. I need to have a sense of the characters before I start, and I need to be able to visualise the scenes. I skipped the college route and learned to write purely by doing, by reading and writing, by sticking to a rigid schedule, five hours a day, every day, without excuse. I work best in the mornings, and am generally started by 7 am. My way of working is utterly blind. I proceed by instinct, and let myself be led along by the feel and rhythm of the sentences. Plagued with constant doubt, I rewrite as I go, so I am not one of those writers who produces clear and distinctive drafts. By the time I have achieved a clean first draft the story has already been rewritten probably a dozen times. And that’s often just the beginning.
I have grown comfortable with my insecurities, and time has modified my expectations. Nobody gets to read my work until it is published. I don’t want feedback, or comments, not while the ink is still wet. These are my stories, for better or worse. My only real ambition for them now, the single challenge I demand of myself, is that they seem truthful. I want people to believe that they are reading about real moments, real lives, that they are glimpsing something genuine. If I can come even close to achieving this, then that is enough.
(c) Billy O’Callaghan
Winner of the Irish Book Aawards Writing.ie Short Story of the Year for The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind
The stories in Billy O Callaghan’s new collection, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, explore how people in crisis can pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and find among them some glint of worth. An institutionalised orphan boy in 1950s Ireland is sold into servitude as a farm labourer. A once-renowned Sevillano matador falls, in a single misstep, into obscurity. A grief-stricken father struggles with the notion of reality. And a man returns home after years of exile to see the child he abandoned long ago once again. In sinuous, evocative prose, O Callaghan weaves an emotionally truthful narrative thread of hope and redemption in the face of adversity. The thirteen stories in this stunning new collection attempt to illuminate the darkness.
The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind is available in all good bookshops and online here.
Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: In Exile and In Too Deep (2008 and 2009 respectively, both published by Mercier Press), and The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, published by New Island Press), the title story of which was honoured with the Writing.ie Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year.
Over the past decade, more than seventy of his stories have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals and magazines around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, Crannóg, the Fiddlehead (Canada), Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kyoto Journal (Japan), the Linnet’s Wings, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Pilvax (Hungary), the Southeast Review, Southword, Verbal Magazine (Northern Ireland), Versal (Holland), and Yuan Yang: a Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing. He has also written for the Irish Examiner, the Evening Echo and the Irish Times.
Billy O'Callaghan
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Irish Book Award winner, Costa Short Story Award finalist. Novel, My Coney Island Baby, Jonathan Cape & Harper, 2019.
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Publish date May 16, 2017
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Experience
Author
Novelist, Short Story writer
Company NameAuthor
Dates EmployedNov 1999 – Present Employment Duration18 yrs 9 mos
LocationCork, Ireland
I am the author of three short story collections: 'In Exile' (2008) and 'In Too Deep' (2009), both published by Mercier Press; and 'The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind' (2013), published by New Island Books (winner of a 2013 Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award, and selected as Cork's 'One City, One Book' 2017).
My first novel, 'The Dead House,' was published in Ireland by Brandon/O'Brien Press, in May 2017, and in the U.S. by Arcade/Skyhorse in May 2018.
My new novel, 'My Coney Island Baby', is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape (UK) in January 2019, and in the U.S. by Harper, with a new short story collection, still untitled, to follow in 2020.
My stories have been broadcast nationally on RTE Radio's 'The Book on One', Sunday Miscellany and the Francis MacManus Awards series, and have earned recognition from a number of awards, including the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award , the Costa Short Story Award, the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award & the George A. Birmingham Award. I have also received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council.
Over the past fifteen years, more than 100 of my short stories have appeared in magazines and literary journals around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares Solos, Salamander, the Saturday Evening Post and the Southeast Review.
www.billyocallaghan.ie
Cork County Libraries
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Company NameCork County Libraries
Dates EmployedApr 2016 – Dec 2016 Employment Duration9 mos
LocationCork, Ireland
Education
Douglas Community School
Douglas Community School
Dates attended or expected graduation 1987 – 1992
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Accomplishments
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Publications
The Dead House Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind In Too Deep In Exile
QUOTED: "Over the years, I've heard all kinds of yarns about Ouija boards and the dangers involved in dabbling with forces beyond our understanding. Also, in Ireland we are an odd mix of strict Catholicism underlaid with some lingering pagan concessions."
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Print Marked Items
Forces Beyond Our Understanding: PW
Talks with Billy O'Callaghan
Lenny Picker
Publishers Weekly.
265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
In The Dead House (Arcade, May), a supernatural thriller, O'Callaghan crafts a contemporary ghost story
set in rural Ireland.
You've written that this story has been in your bones for decades. Could you expand on that?
I carried it around in my head long before I ever seriously thought of writing as something I could possibly
do. For so long, actually, that I'm not really sure where the seeds of the idea came from. But I have just
always loved ghost stories. I love to read them, and I love to hear them being told, and I suppose it was
inevitable that I'd eventually start making up stories of my own. There's such a rich tradition of the
supernatural tale in Irish literature, and the ghost story always seemed such a part of the social fabric,
certainly within the world I knew.
Did anyone in your family influence you?
The stories that actually changed my life were ones told to me by my grandmother, sitting at the fireside as
a very young child, and it was these, told to me on cold white days in an otherwise silent house and in a
voice old as dirt and full of weather, that instilled in me a passion for narrative. I write today because of
those old stories, and I carry that voice inside me, always. I remember listening to her talk about the fairies
or the banshee, or the many strange things she'd either seen or heard tell of. She made the natural and
supernatural not seem so far apart, and I think I've carried at least some sense of that with me as I've grown.
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Was there a local legend that inspired the plot?
No. But over the years, I've heard all kinds of yarns about Ouija boards and the dangers involved in
dabbling with forces beyond our understanding. Also, in Ireland we are an odd mix of strict Catholicism
underlaid with some lingering pagan concessions. Genetic memory is hard to overcome, and a tendency
towards superstition is part of the native character.
Why make your narrator English?
From the beginning, I knew that the narrator would have to be an outsider--the logical city-dwelling
businessman taken out of his element sets everything off-kilter. The Hound of the Baskervilles was an
influence. When Sherlock Holmes first hears of the legend of a hound from hell, he is in his comfortable
London rooms, and such an idea seems preposterous. But when he and Watson get out on the moors, where
fog lingers and sounds are amplified by the wind and the undulations of the landscape, suddenly the story
takes a more plausible turn. I wanted a similar counterpoint.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Picker, Lenny. "Forces Beyond Our Understanding: PW Talks with Billy O'Callaghan." Publishers Weekly,
19 Mar. 2018, p. 53. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977333/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f8106871. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977333
QUOTED: "chilling, beautifully written."
"Fans of psychological thrillers with a ghostly undercurrent will be richly rewarded."
7/15/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1531677119467 3/3
The Dead House
Publishers Weekly.
265.10 (Mar. 5, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Dead House
Billy O'Callaghan. Arcade, $24.99 (216p)
ISBN 978-1-62872-913-9
An unspecified something that has just occurred prompts retired artists' agent Michael Simmons, the
English narrator of Irish author O'Callaghan's chilling, beautifully written first novel, to tell a story he has
tried to forget. Flash back nine years to a housewarming party hosted by painter Maggie Turner, a client of
Michael's, who has recently bought and fixed up, with his financial assistance, a rundown cottage on the
west coast of Ireland. Maggie has invited Michael and two other friends to visit for several days. One
evening at the beach, Michael spots a "flicker of whiteness" that he thinks might be a woman, an image that
takes on sinister overtones after he learns of a grim bit of local history. O'Callaghan combines his gift at
describing settings ("the casual filthy-white scatter of sheep flecking the distance, the tumbling ground a
desperation of greenery, thick as pond-scum in parts") with subtle suggestions that something unnatural is
going on. Fans of psychological thrillers with a ghostly undercurrent will be richly rewarded. Agent:
Svetlana Pironko. Author Rights Agency (Ireland). (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Dead House." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530430262/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee3a1019.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530430262
QUOTED: "Despite the narrator Mike’s efforts to ramp up the chill factor, The Dead House rarely engages."
"told in a naturalistic style that reads at times like clunky memoir—think Michael Harding without the charming detail."
"The horrors themselves are compelling enough. ... But as The Master tells his tale, readers must suspend disbelief in a novel that is supremely naturalistic in other respects."
"Hailed as a master of understatement for his short fiction, this quality is lacking in his debut novel. The Dead House is a triumph of the obvious over the artistic."
The Dead House review: Odd blend of naturalistic and uncanny
Debut novel from acclaimed short-story writer Billy O’Callaghan lacks finesse
Billy O’Callaghan: Some lovely details do shine through The Dead House, which harks to the author’s pedigree as a short-story writer. Photograph: Claire O’Rorke
Billy O’Callaghan: Some lovely details do shine through The Dead House, which harks to the author’s pedigree as a short-story writer. Photograph: Claire O’Rorke
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, May 20, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, May 20, 2017, 06:00
‘To be natural is to be obvious,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” Billy O’Callaghan’s debut novel The Dead House lays its foundations firmly in the natural world. Set predominantly in the scenic coastal village of Allihies, Co Cork, the book is vivid in its descriptions of landscape. O’Callaghan’s affinity with nature is the standout attribute in a novel lacking in tension and finesse.
A heavy-handed prologue announces the book’s intentions: “Tonight, I have a story to tell, one that for years I’ve kept buried, one that I’d hoped could have remained so forever . . . Because time, as we all know, can blur things. But maybe it can also, in its way, bring clarity. I only hope that, with so much at stake, I have not waited too long to speak of this”.
Despite the narrator Mike’s efforts to ramp up the chill factor, The Dead House rarely engages. Told in a naturalistic style that reads at times like clunky memoir – think Michael Harding without the charming detail – the story concerns a female painter, Maggie, who relocates to Ireland after an abusive relationship. Mike is her art dealer and friend, who loans her thousands of pounds to buy a rundown, rat-infested cottage in Cork.
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Scenes that show Mike caring for Maggie in London after a violent episode are well drawn, but the relationship is underexplored. Instead we’re given a ghost story of sorts as Mike and two others – gallery owner Alison and poet Liz – visit Maggie for a weekend in Allihies that starts out with a few drinks and ends up with Maggie possessed by a Famine-era ghost. “The Master” comes to life in a cliched scene involving a Ouija board and manages to imbue Maggie with a lengthy monologue of the past horrors of the cottage.
Compelling horror
The horrors themselves are compelling enough, perhaps the most compelling part of the book. Children die in fires, a young girl is brutally raped and murdered, the community at large perish from starvation. But as The Master tells his tale, readers must suspend disbelief in a novel that is supremely naturalistic in other respects.
There are similar issues with narration in earlier sections when Mike relates Maggie’s history and her move to Cork. How can he, from London, know the details of her life in Ireland, what she sees when she looks out her window – and, more gratingly, the inner workings of her mind? A weak attempt to ascribe the knowledge to phone conversations does little to mitigate the implausibility.
These jarring switches are compounded by a tendency to lead the reader. In the cottage in Allihies, Mike’s soon-to-be girlfriend Alison “looked relaxed, laughed readily and was clearly glad to be here”. Mike himself is “comfortable without actually challenging the threshold of serious wealth. Fine art has, for me, been a relatively lucrative business”.
Addendum commentary is common, with little thought for economy of language: “Alison wants Hannah to know her roots, and to feel at home. Which is only right.” A plain-clothes police officer is “a woman in clothes so plain she might as well have carried a sign around her neck”. And “the odds on achieving a conviction were thin to the point of anorexic”.
Dialogue is unnecessarily clarified: “addressing neither one of us in particular”. Even a Chinese takeaway gets explained as “recklessly unhealthy but far more convenient” than cooking. Cliches appear frequently – sooner rather than later, people consumed with work, worlds that stop turning, optimism stoked. “Life gets in the way,” Mike tells the reader, “it happens to the best of us”.
Putrid stench
Some lovely details do shine through at times, which harks to O’Callaghan’s pedigree as a short-story writer. Maggie’s eyes are “the deep pond green of carnival grass”. When Mike travels back to the cottage to check up on Maggie, “her hair carried a putrid stench, the sharp vinegar reek of sweat and decay”. His insights as an art dealer are interesting, as are some of the reflections peppered throughout the narrative, though they have an authorial feel: “In a city, with its crowds and traffic noise, reality is a sheet of thick glass, solid and impenetrable. But out here, it is a far less certain state”.
Nature is admirably showcased throughout: “The ground flowed in tumultuous order a cascade of the wildest washed-out greens torn and split by jutting flashes of slate and limestone.”
From Cork, O’Callaghan is author of three short-story collections including The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind (2013), the title story of which earned him the 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award for The Boatman last January. Hailed as a master of understatement for his short fiction, this quality is lacking in his debut novel. The Dead House is a triumph of the obvious over the artistic.
QUOTED: "In a first-person voice unlike any other I’ve come across, O’Callaghan gifts us with a story that unfolds in just the way you’d want to hear it by the fireside: it is confessional, it is insightful, it is no-nonsense and direct, yet wields evocative words slipped in so seamlessly that the reader is pulled into the fantastic story in cresting waves."
Book Review: 'The Dead House' by Billy O'Callaghan
Posted by Claire Fullerton on June 21, 2017 at 10:30amView Blog
I’ve been following author Billy O’Callaghan’s career with rapt enthusiasm, since I fortuitously came across him online, last year. That he is Irish caught my attention, and as I delved further, I discovered he is the author of three short story collections, all of which I’ve read, all of which, to me, are in their own league and genre of what can only be classified as literary excellence. And so it was that I awaited the March, 2017 release of 'The Dead House,' O’Callaghan’s first novel, and subsequently tore through it in three sittings. It’s the type of book you can’t put down, yet when you do, it stays with you.
In a first-person voice unlike any other I’ve come across, O’Callaghan gifts us with a story that unfolds in just the way you’d want to hear it by the fireside: it is confessional, it is insightful, it is no-nonsense and direct, yet wields evocative words slipped in so seamlessly that the reader is pulled into the fantastic story in cresting waves that move the story forward, while explaining the inner workings of the narrator’s vantage point. The reader understands the narrator, art dealer Michael Simmons, right out of the gate. He lays his cards on the table with no apology as he tells about his client, young, vulnerable, and frail painter, Maggie Turner, with whom he cultivates a mentor-like relationship verging on that of siblings, as he guides her career. That Michael is devoted to Maggie’s overall well-being helps us understand his acceptance of her capricious tendencies, and so it is that when Maggie decides to move from London to an isolated, desolate seaside location on Ireland’s rugged west coast, Michael has reservations, yet chalks them up to her artistic temperament needing artistic space.
'The Dead House' is centered on one fateful night, during a weekend house party at Maggie’s renovated, pre-Famine, Irish cottage that involves a small group of friends, a bottle of whiskey, and a Ouija board. Everything careens in spine-tingling plausibility from there, in a dynamic that begins in seemingly harmless fun, yet quickly turns off-kilter with unintended consequences that sneak up over the readers shoulder with such disturbance that this book is best not read at night. And yet I’d be hard-pressed to label 'The Dead House' a ghost story; though it is that, it is more. It is a treatise on friendship, a look at the ambiguity of new love, a tip-of-the-hat to Ireland’s storied past, and a lyrical love song to the unfathomable beauty of Ireland’s haunted, windswept terrain.
Let me now confess something I’ve never done before, after reading the last line of this book: I went back to the first page and began again. The reason I did this is I was nowhere near ready or willing to let the narrator’s voice go; I was too invested, I was too concerned, and the fact that the story is so suspenseful that I read it with white-knuckled urgency made me fully aware, even as I read, that I simply had to go back and revisit its artful language. I’ll site an example of O’Callaghan’s genius with language here: “Another Sunday. Christ, the fools that time can make of us.” But I’m gushing. Because O’Callaghan deserves it.
All praise 'The Dead House.' Do yourself a favor and get ahold of this book. It will be available in America come spring of 2018, but, if you’re American, you can do as I did, and order it online through its publisher, O’Brien Press. http://www.obrien.ie/
Claire Fullerton is the author of 'Dancing to an Irish Reel,' and 'A Portal in Time.' Her third novel, 'Mourning Dove,' will be released in early 2018. http://www.clairefullerton.com
QUOTED: "The Dead House was an atmospheric debut, delivering a gripping psychological thriller that will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book."
The Dead House: A Novel By Billy O’Callaghan
May 3rd, 2018 Kimberly Review 52 Comments
The Dead House: A Novel by Billy O’Callaghan
The Dead House
by Billy O'Callaghan
Genres: Thriller
Source: Publisher
Purchase: Amazon
Goodreads
Rating: One StarOne StarOne StarOne Star
This best-selling debut by an award-winning writer is both an eerie contemporary ghost story and a dread-inducing psychological thriller. Maggie is a successful young artist who has had bad luck with men. Her last put her in the hospital and, after she’s healed physically, left her needing to get out of London to heal mentally and find a place of quiet that will restore her creative spirit. On the rugged west coast of Ireland, perched on a wild cliff side, she spies the shell of a cottage that dates back to Great Famine and decides to buy it. When work on the house is done, she invites her dealer to come for the weekend to celebrate along with a couple of women friends, one of whom will become his wife. On the boozy last night, the other friend pulls out an Ouija board. What sinister thing they summon, once invited, will never go.
Ireland is a country haunted by its past. In Billy O'Callaghan's hands, its terrible beauty becomes a force of inescapable horror that reaches far back in time, before the Famine, before Christianity, to a pagan place where nature and superstition are bound in an endless knot
freaky Standalone thriller well written
I was looking for a twisty tale and stumbled upon The Dead House by Billy O’Callaghan. From its atmospheric cover to the mention of an Ouija Board I was all in. Grab a cup of cocoa and turn up the lights as this supernatural tale will send shivers down your spine.
First I must confess, Ouija Boards scare the shite out of me. You don’t mess with the supernatural and oh lordy did O’Callaghan share an atmospheric tale that sent a shiver down my spine without delivering gore as we skated on the edge of the supernatural realm.
The story is told from the pov of Michael Simmons as he relates events that occurred nine years previously. Michael is an art dealer, who is now married and has a little girl. He shares a time that still haunts him and his wife. It all revolves around one of his clients, Maggie and the small cottage she purchased on the rugged west coast of Ireland.
O’Callaghan’s prose and beautiful imagery pulled me in as much as Michael’s sharing of events that occurred. While I cannot say I was particularly fond of any of the characters, it is the events, landscape and supernatural elements that held me captive into the wee hours. The author builds suspense by sharing the history of this quiet little seaside area Maggie has settled in. Through the character’s unease, witness accounts and hints of something in the corner of your eye this tale will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
The Dead House is a relatively short tale at just around two hundred and twenty-five pages and the ending is classic thriller 101. I certainly look forward to reading more from this author.
I have been vague on the details, as I feel details are best left for the reader to discover. The Dead House was an atmospheric debut, delivering a gripping psychological thriller that will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.
The Dead House was an atmospheric debut, delivering a gripping psychological thriller that will stay with you. #supernatural #debut #thriller CLICK TO TWEET
About Billy O’Callaghan
Billy O'Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: ‘In Exile’ and ‘In Too Deep’ (2008 and 2009 respectively, both published by Mercier Press), and ‘The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind’ (2013, published by New Island Books), which was honoured with a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award and which has been selected as Cork’s ‘One City, One Book’ for 2017. His first novel, ‘The Dead House’, was published by Brandon Books, an imprint of O’Brien Press, in May 2017, and is due for publication in the U.S. by Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, in April 2018.
QUOTED: "Each story in this collection invites readers into the inner torments of its characters. I could not race through these stories, nor did I want to. When I finished each one, I went back to the beginning and read the story again, only to discover moments of lightness, moments when a character turned away from a choice that might have led down a different path, or moments when a character settled for what was and gave up on what might have been."
"This is writing at its finest."
The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind by Billy O’Callaghan
Posted on October 10, 2016 by Dactyl Review
thingswelose What to say about Things we Lose (New Island Press, 228 pages) a book that stunned me, time and again. I might call Billy O’Callaghan a “writer’s writer,” if that term did not immediately consign a writer to obscurity. (In the USA, Richard Yates is often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” and until the movie Revolutionary Road, few people, apart from those who taught in MFA programs, knew his name.)
I would like to invent a new way to describe what I think Billy O’Callaghan will leave as his literary legacy. I would call him a “human’s human” (with a pen) or an “explorer’s explorer” of our dreams. I would call him a poet of the spirit. Or, maybe, to use a more prosaic analogy, he is a housekeeper who assiduously dusts the cluttered rooms we keep closed, even from our conscious minds.
In the moving first story of the collection, “Zhuangzi Dreamed He Was A Butterfly,” a husband and wife grieve a daughter’s death, and the husband explores the idea of time. “When you think about it, there is just so much that can go wrong. If any one of those tiny workings should crack or spit apart, then that’s it; as fast as a finger-snap the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. One small break and all time stops.” Anyone who has lost a child knows that the speeding up or slowing down of time, the infinite replaying of the disaster-that-might-have-been-averted, forms only one side of the prism through which a grieving parent views the past.
In “Lila” the narrator, riding the L, spots a familiar face. “In the two decades since moving to Chicago I have thought of her often, the way we all do with close friends who for a time mean more than the world itself to us but then, for whatever reason, fall out of our lives.” True, right? We’ve all thought this at one time or another.
As the story progresses, we learn why their paths diverged; the narrator must come to terms with what happened before they lost touch. When the story returns to the present, the reader is fully anchored in the physical world. “Seconds build, full of the train’s dull inner-ear heartbeat, a smooth enough sensation, but only by comparison, and yet it felt as though time were moving in reverse, taking us out of ourselves back to some better state.”
I wish I had written that sentence. Here’s another.
“He was wearing yesterday’s wool shirt, and the fibres held his musk in a way that was not pleasant. She felt an urge to pull back, but couldn’t, because his big hands held gentle but secure against her hips. Trapped, all she could do, short of insulting or embarrassing him by making a fuss, was pray that God would grant her the small mercy of not having this stench forever attach itself in her mind to what was supposed to be one of the most special and precious of moments of her entire life.”
As writers we strive to use all five senses, but I’ve rarely seen a writer evoke so much emotion from a sense of smell.
Each story in this collection invites readers into the inner torments of its characters. I could not race through these stories, nor did I want to. When I finished each one, I went back to the beginning and read the story again, only to discover moments of lightness, moments when a character turned away from a choice that might have led down a different path, or moments when a character settled for what was and gave up on what might have been.
Some people talk about our “illusions,” as if there were some all-seeing Eye that could pass judgment on what is, or is not, the right way of understanding life’s confusions. Instead of illusions, Billy O’Callaghan talks about “dreams.” For the characters in “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby,” “The Matador,” and many of these stories, dreams are where people find relief from the weight of their losses, disappointments, self-inflicted wounds, and limitations.
This is writing at its finest.
– Marylee MacDonald, author of Bonds of Love & Blood, 2016
Excerpt from “The Forge”: The blight had come and then come back, and the first year was terrible but only the beginning. The shellfish were lost when the ocean brought a red tide, and the second year the herring stayed north, out of reach of the boats. Those that could got to survive a while on rats, insects, any birds that they could catch, but as fodder diminished weakness grew until, soon enough, there was nothing. And it was bad for everyone. A mile over, towards Allihies, a fisherman’s wife was lost in birthing. One of the women saved the child through butchery, but it was born small and seven weeks early and died that first night. The fisherman sent the woman out, then blocked the door and set fire to the thatch. The house took almost an hour to go. There were three more children in the house and those who had come down to see said they never woke, that they were already dead from smoke before the flames reached them. And the fisherman stood at the window, staunch as a tree, gazing out into the darkness, until the roof came down around him. In the days after, the neighbours raked through the embers, collecting what could be salvaged.
The Master kept a hedge school down in one of the back acres, sometimes down on the beach. The children came from as far away as Cahirkeen in the north and Knockroe to the south. Men and women, too, as things began to deteriorate. He taught them to read and add up, but mostly he instructed them in prayer, in the ways of worship. The priests had come, of course, generations of them, and they’d thrived during the better times when prayers never had to be more than easy words. They were tolerated but couldn’t quite belong, and they never penetrated the fabric because the stories they told had no grounding here. This land had its own gods, ancient when the likes of Christ was young. These gods controlled the sun and the tide and the seasons, and they were cruel and vengeful to disobedience but generous to loyalty, protecting those who knew how to properly ask. Teaching was required, the old faith needed awakening, especially once the potatoes turned putrid in the fields and everything stopped growing. The congregation needed to make amends for what had been abandoned.
QUOTED: "masterfully written short stories."
BOOK REVIEW: THE THINGS WE LOSE, THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND
The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind Book Cover TITLE: The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind
AUTHOR: Billy O'Callaghan
GENRE: Fiction, Short Stories
PUBLISHER: New Island Press
RELEASE DATE: February 18, 2014
FORMAT: Digitial & Paperback
PAGES: 228
Synopsis:
The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind is a new collection by Billy O'Callaghan that explores everyday existence in the aftermath of cataclysms both subtle and overt. The characters who populate these stories are people afflicted by life and circumstance, hauled from some idyll and confronted with such real world problems as divorce, miscarriage, cancer, desertion, bereavement and the disintegration of love.
From the tale of an institutionalised orphan boy in 1950s Ireland sold into servitude as a farm labourer, to the Sevillian matador who in a single misstep has fallen into a life of obscurity, and on through to the poignant title story of a man returning to his island home to see again the child that he abandoned, these are stories about picking up the shattered pieces and finding among them some glint of value, and some way to survive.
In The Second Coming, Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” Yet here the reader is offered evidence to the contrary, with the suggestion that the human heart boasts extraordinary resilience and is possessed of an ability to find redemption in the most unexpected of places. In the face of tragedy we re-evaluate ourselves. We bear the guilt, sorrow and regret for the things we have lost or given up, we seek the light, and we endure. These thirteen stories attempt to illuminate the darkness.
Book Review:
The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind is collection of masterfully written short stories by Billy O’Callaghan. Each of the thirteen stories, while told mostly from the perspective of a middle aged man, are all very different and touch on what some might consider the darker aspects of life such as bereavement, cancer, divorce, longing, mid-life crisis and miscarriage.
Although O’Callaghan’s prose is infused with rawness and melancholy he also displays moments of insight and profundity which could only come from the mind of one who has known intimately the heartache and loss experienced by the characters he writes about. Reading about the couple dealing with the loss of a child in ‘We’re Not Made of Stone’, and again in ‘Icebergs’, was so close to the bone that I literally had to put the book down to process the emotions it brought up.
Read The Hero Returns (related link)
Some people live their whole lives crippled by depression without even knowing it. The signs can be subtle. And we’re flesh and blood, you know Maggie. We’re not made of stone.
Many might expect with a collection of short stories by an Irish author that they would be set in idyllic surrounds with the ubiquitous rain sodden fields being lashed by gales from the Atlantic Ocean, or claustrophobic towns somewhere in the Midlands. But the stories contained within The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind are set in diverse places such as Taiwan, New York, and Spain giving it a very international flavour as well as wind-swept islands off the West of Ireland.
It is O’Callaghan’s way with words and his ability to convey mood as well tone in the story which is his greatest strength as a writer. All throughout the book I came across such writerly gems as..
Lately though, I’ve been coming to understand that life really might be less about destination than the journey. Keep Ithaca always in your mind. That’s a realisation, perhaps even a kind of wisdom, which only comes with time, and may be one of the main reasons why this story took so long to write. In the end, if it amounts to anything at all, it is my attempt to explain and hopefully gain some understanding of who I was at twenty-seven, a wild-eyed child learning to swim amongst the big waves. A stranger, it seems, from the vantage of settled middle-age. Until I look closely.
or this..
Our pasts pool around our ankles, dragging at every forward step we take, but it doesn’t do to dwell too deeply on what has gone before, even if we sometimes use those past events to explain or excuse the things we’ve done. So much has happened to me here, enough to chase me away, enough to call me back.
Usually with collections of short stories there are hits as well as misses. This wasn’t the case for me with this book. I was fully drawn into each story but there were a few that stood out such as ‘Keep Well to Seaward’, ‘For Old Times’ Sake’, ‘Icebergs’ and the last story which gives its name to the collection. O’Callaghan’s work has given me a renewed appreciation for short story as a form. Superlative writing from a master short story writer.
The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, by Billy O’Callaghan
Paperback review
Kevin Breathnach
Sat, Nov 9, 2013, 01:00
First published:
Sat, Nov 9, 2013, 01:00
Coloured by nostalgia for painful pasts, this is a collection narrated by middle-aged men for whom time and memory have become pliable. Tragedies occur at quite a rate. In Icebergs, Abby loses a child, suffers from cancer and suffers marriage difficulties. The short story is not a large enough literary form to accommodate all three events. Tragedy must be qualitative, not quantitative. In the collection’s best story, We Are Not Made of Stone, James comes to prefer novels of characterisation to those of plot. This is a false dichotomy that points up the main weakness of O’Callaghan’s stories: they seem uninterested in formal adventure. Each one starts in the present, leaps back into the past and then dutifully returns with another didactic cliche at the ready. “Life might really be less about the destination than the journey,” says one character. But when the journey and the destination are always the same, it probably isn’t worth the bother.