Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails

Edited by Philip O Ceallaigh

It is an exciting collection from established and emerging writers, with distinctive voices and attention to the subtle craft of short story writing.

One of the most striking stories is The Yellow Handbag by Christine Dwyer Hickey. Set in Dublin, the narrator, Ashok, originally from India, is working as a chauffeur. This brings him into contact with an elderly American lady with “thick coiffed hair, stiff and white as meringue”.

It is Ashok’s job to drive his passenger around the city, taking her to places she visited in her glory days; places such as Farmleigh and the Four Courts. Ashok is trying to cope with his young daughter’s rejection of him while the old lady finds Dublin all changed and unwelcoming.

The two characters connect in a way that would have been impossible at the beginning of the narrative when Ashok presented himself as a somewhat servile character.

A young daughter whom he rarely sees is what keeps the first person narrator of Kevin Barry’s The Girls and the Dogs from total despair. This darkly comic and disturbing story sees the narrator holed up in a filthy caravan in Gort, having fled Cork because of a drugs deal that went wrong. A menacing character called Evan The Head sets up the narrator in this refuge from hell. “He said that I was his friend after all and he softened the word in his mouth – friend – in a way that I found troubling.” Barry writes compellingly about outsiders and their attempts to survive in a crazy world.

A testosterone-fuelled world is conjured up in Stag, by Luke Woods. Set in Prague, a group of Englishmen, all sporting factory-issued rips in the knees of their jeans and polo shirts, are on the prowl, consuming vast quantities of beer, seeking out women. The narrator becomes separated from the gang and runs into a hustler who ‘invites’ him to a cabaret.

There is a real sense of an aggressive male world at play here. Woods doesn’t present his characters in anything approaching a sympathetic manner but the nocturnal odyssey around the city and the sense of teeming life, particularly low life, makes the story oddly compelling.

A more genteel setting – a middle-class dinner party – is the focus of Madeleine D’Arcy’s Waiting for the Bullet. But the veneer of sophistication and good manners can’t hide the tension around the table as the four characters engage in a game of Russian roulette – with a toy gun. D’Arcy wastes no time in cutting to the quick. Her opening sentence grabs the attention of the reader. “My husband Turlough arrived home with the gun a few weeks ago,” she writes. This taut story unfolds through a series of pretend shoot-outs.

The Boys, by Emily Firetog, is a sad family drama comprising “a faggot and a schizophrenic” in the words of the first-person narrator. The schizophrenic commits suicide, having returned to his family home from Berlin. That leaves the gay man and his widowed father alone. There is a sense of an injustice having unfolded in this family with the father saying: “Why can’t I have a normal life? Why am I here with you? You know we made a deal – mom and I – I was going to go first.”

There are no ‘normal’ lives in this collection. But there is great humanity here, observed with precision and style.