Tag: alan ryan

More Potato Famine Horror: Alan Ryan’s Cast A Cold Eye

I reviewed Alan Ryan’s The Kill and Dead White last winter. I was originally going to talk about Cast a Cold Eye in the same post as those two books, but I realised that that pair were set in the same village and shared characters, so I kept Cast a Cold Eye for later.

Sphere – 1986 (Originally published 1984)

Jack, a successful American author, goes to Ireland and rents a house so that he can research and write his new novel. He’s staying in Doolin, a little village on the west coast of the island, and shortly after arriving, he sees some old men pouring a bottle of blood into a fresh grave. Soon thereafter, he starts to see ghosts of victims of the potato famine.

Alright. Let’s stop there. More potato famine horror? I was not a fan of the last book I read within that very niche genre. Fortunately, Alan Ryan’s writing is far, far better than Ann Pilling’s, and the story here is more intriguing, even if it does also feature very skinny ghosts.

I want to make it clear that my disdain for potato famine horror isn’t because I’m offended by the author turning the suffering of an oppressed group of real people into entertainment. It’s more the fact that the potato famine is the only thing a lot of North Americans know about Ireland. This is like an Irish author writing a horror novel set in America about a hamburger monster or a story set in Australia about a zombie kangaroo. (I think the only other horror novel set in Ireland that I’ve read by a non-Irish author was Paul Huson’s The Keepsake. Thankfully that one had no hungry ghosts. It was about a stone that turns into a vampire. Cool!)

In fairness though, Ryan does a pretty good job of making it seem that he really likes Ireland, and I would be shocked if part of this story isn’t autobiographical. He has to have been there to write some of the things he writes. Trust me. He references tea 45 times throughout the 350 pages.

I was 23 when I left Ireland. I wasn’t planning on a long term move, but things ended up that way, and I still miss Ireland greatly. It’s strange going back. I’ve been gone for long enough that little things that I grew up with seem foreign. There’s moments when I feel like a tourist in my home country.

It was interesting reading this book. Some of the descriptions about the landscape were great. I tend to travel more in Ireland when I return now than I ever did when I lived there, and the only time I’ve visited Clare, the county where this book is set, was as a tourist. Ryan gets the countryside right.

At the same time though, there were definitely a few cringey bits. I didn’t like the author’s idea of “Irish time”. Granted, the buses in Dublin are shit, but I don’t think Irish people are less punctual than anyone else. Not everyone wears woolen jumpers either. Also, the parts where people would say “I am” instead of “yes” annoyed me.

Of the three books I’ve read by Ryan, this one is probably the best horror novel. Dead White is good, but clowns aren’t scary. Skinny little children running around at night are scary. This is, at its heart, a good old-fashioned ghost story. The ending was ok, but things didn’t come together quite as much as I was hoping for. I really enjoyed reading this book, but I think a large part of my enjoyment stemmed from the fact that I’m going to Ireland in a few weeks, and all of the talk of rainy days and cups of tea made me really excited. I will try to track down Ryan’s short stories in the future.

The Trouble in Deacon’s Kill: Alan Ryan’s The Kill and Dead White

The Kill

Tor – 1982

I really got into this book when I was reading it, but the ending was a let down.

The novel starts off with a child being murdered in the woods near a place named Deacon’s Kill. This scene is deeply unpleasant, but it does a good job of engaging the reader. Soon after the kid dies, a young professional buys a house in “the Kill” and invites all her friends for a party. One of them goes out to pee in the woods and gets murdered. A young couple who had been at the party then start living in the farm house and making friends with the locals, but it’s not long before they realise something bad is in the woods near their house.

That’s a pretty solid set up. I was totally invested at this point. I read the first 200 pages of the book in one sitting. Unfortunately, the ending of the book happens too fast, and the explanation given for the kills in The Kill is bizarre and unsatisfying. I’m going to talk about it in the next paragraph, so maybe skip that until you’ve finished the book.

A prehistoric, invisible, almost invincible man was fossilized inside a stone until it rolled down a hill and cracked open. I’m not a geologist or historian or anything, but the last time that the Eastern part of the United States was under water was the Cambrian period, about 50 million years ago. This guy is pretty old. Also, if he doesn’t weigh enough to make a footprint, how does he exert enough force to kill people? There’s no explanation given to this extremely mysterious antagonist. It just doesn’t work.

Dead White

Tor – 1983

I had planned to include two of Ryan’s novels in this post, but I didn’t realise when I started Dead White that it is also set in Deacon’s Kill and features some of the same characters as The Kill. It’s not a sequel, but the town itself is as much a character here as in The Kill, and I would strongly recommend reading these books together. The text also references Charles L. Grant’s Oxrun Station and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel as if they were real places. I thought that was pretty cool.

The events in Dead White take place only a little while after the events of The Kill. A big snow storm hits the town of Deacon’s Kill at the same time that a circus train full of diseased, bloodthirsty clowns arrives at the town’s abandoned railway station. This sounds silly (in the best possible way), but the writing is good enough to fill the book with suspense and atmosphere. The chapters are all fairly short too, and every time I would tell myself, “One more before bed.”, I’d end up reading 7 or 8.

I really enjoyed reading The Kill, but the ending fell flat. Dead White is just as enjoyable, but the ending here is more cohesive while remaining just as bizarre. It is a book about murderous clowns, but it predates both King’s It and Killer Klowns From Outer Space., so it doesn’t really feel like the cheesy clownsploitation horror that I’m sure we’re all sick of. I really enjoyed it. I’ll definitely be reading Ryan’s Cast a Cold Eye in the future.