Winterwood

Even if you brace yourself for a dark, twisted story, you'll still be creeped out by this tale, set in an Irish mountain town. Redmond Hatch meets storyteller Ned Strange, his alter ego of sorts. As Redmond describes his life and their encounters, secrets are revealed. Scenes shift back and forth over the years, with the story moving through pubs, apartments, jobs, and a haunting place called Winterwood. Apart from Ned's stories, there is limited dialogue, leaving McCabe to rely on vivid descriptions and on narrator Gerry O'Brien to create an atmosphere with a range of moods. His sole American character comes off as more Midwestern than upstate New York, but his Irish voices are both colorful and filled with emotion as the tormented tale unfolds. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

October 16, 2006
Freelance writer Redmond Hatch loves his young wife, Catherine—he is 40 and she is 22 when they wed in 1981—and adores his infant daughter, Imogen, but in Irish author McCabe's eighth novel (his prior work included Breakfast on Pluto
and The Butcher Boy
, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Redmond's happy slice of the world cruelly crumbles. A few years into wedded bliss, Redmond's wife cuckolds and then divorces him; he feigns suicide, assumes a false identity and disappears into a sad-sack life that spirals sharply downward after he reads a newspaper account of the suicide of convicted child murderer (and creepy acquaintance) Ned Strange: Redmond's suddenly haunted by nightmares and hallucinations in which Ned molests him. He stalks his former family and, in 1991, kidnaps and kills his estranged daughter, burying her in the isolated countryside—their imaginary "winterwood"—and visiting her grave over the next decade. Redmond, however, has yet to bottom out. Despite a fractured, hard-to-follow chronology, this tale about a man's descent into madness is both artfully repellent and hypnotically compelling.