"When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent".SynopsisThe Butcher Boy is a darkly comic yet disturbing novel by Irish author Patrick McCabe. Set in a small town in Ireland in the early 1960...
Patrick McCabe came to my attention in the 1990s with his novel The Butcher Boy. Like that novel, Winterwood is the story of a killer. Like that novel, it is blackly comic. Redmond Hatch returns to rural Ireland where he meets Pappie Strange, a musician with a string of stories, some of which ...
When did matricide become comical? When Patrick McCabe started writing about it.Emerald Germs of Ireland is a story about Pat McNab and his sick and twisted little mind. He has a strange relationship with his mother, a little Norman Bates-esque at times. This strange relationship ultimately en...
At first I didn't like it couldn't get into it. After I was about a third of the way through I started to want to know what would befall the two main characters. I didn't really like the way the book was laid out or the style of the narrative and I found it hard to have any sympathy for the chara...
Part Two(see F23 for part one :-)Personally, I preferred BREAKFAST ON PLUTO. Although, both of these books don’t fall in to the range of books that I would normally read. I normally read thrillers or crime fiction. However, once I got into both of the books I did enjoy them; as a result I think t...
When I first encountered Patrick McCabe through "The Butcher Boy" I was completely blown away. It is such a powerful novel and McCabe's ability to adopt the voice of someone who is mentally disturbed and render them in such authentic, sympathetic terms impressed me to no end. Unfortunately, havin...
Writing as Phildy Hackball, McCabe presents to us, the readers, the stories of over a dozen residents of the small Irish town of Barntrosna. These vignettes vary from the only mildly odd to the extremely eccentric and feature many interesting characters, to put it mildly. Take into account Declan...
I have to say, though, that it’s wonderful to have returned here after all this time, to have come back once more to the place of one’s birth, one’s own hometown, where, effectively, one was formed. Not that you’d recognise it — not in a million years. At least not at first. For, considering the ...
. . . The Oklahoma Mountain Boys were in full swing and the music wafted out through the open upstairs windows of the Turnpike Inn. The lead singer wore a JR stetson and dark glasses, winking to the patrons as they filed in. The drummer chewed gum laconically, twirling his...