Dinosaurs on Other Planets

June 27, 2016
Irish short story writer McLaughlin’s immersive first collection casts a stern eye on individuals, couples, and families caught in nets of their own making, where even the mildest passion can lead to death, and journeys home with new lovers can reveal grim secret lives. Dead insects and decomposing birds abound, and when flowers appear, they’re apt to give off “an odd rancid smell... hot and sweaty and carnal, like meat on the point of turning.” McLaughlin sometimes leans on predictable symbolism and epiphanies: if a thoughtfully arranged table of crystal birds and other animals shows up early in a story, the crystals, by the end, are likely to be shattered. But the author’s precise observations and her compassion toward characters, such as a husband desperately trying to deal with his wife’s mental illness or a girl willing to sell her body to temporarily save the family business, make these stories memorable. And stories such as “The Art of Foot-Binding,” where passages from a fictional Chinese manual on the subject are interposed with a plot about a depressed present-day schoolgirl and her confused mother, or the title story, which opens up into an ambiguous ending rather than tying its strands up neatly, show the ample bag of tricks McLaughlin has at her disposal.

June 1, 2016
Irish short story writer McLaughlin's debut collection is a treat for American readers.Written in clear, simple prose, these 11 stories focus on the potent imagery and the powerful emotions floating beneath the surface of seemingly mundane lives. Each story effectively mines the specific for a universal payoff. The first story, "The Art of Foot-Binding," explores an unhappy wife and mother's domestic angst through the prism of her daughter's history project. In "All About Alice," a 45-year-old woman who spends days tending to her elderly father goes looking for adventure and finds herself unable to keep a lid on the secrets of her younger years. McLaughlin is at her best when demonstrating contrasts among everyday images. Kevin, the main character of "Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate," feels his "missing flask like a phantom limb" while perusing his neighbor Bob Miller's military memorabilia collection in the midst of a neighborhood First Communion party, where little girls rush past as "a battalion of miniature brides, their white sandals clattering over the tiles." The title story makes for a strong finish, when a mother and grandmother feels everyone she loves--spouse, children, grandchild--drifting further and further away. Isolated from the group after dinner one night, having insisted on doing all the cleanup herself, Kate's view out the window includes three wind turbines, whose "red lights shone down from the mountain...a warning to aircraft." Close at hand, her kitchen sink fills, and she watches "the bubble form psychedelic honeycombs, millions and millions of tiny domes, glittering on the dirty plates." In McLaughlin's world, the everyday has the same sparkle--or the same devastation--as a glittering galaxy or a war. There is no weakest link in this powerful set of stories--all the characters are given space and time for their stories to build to rich conclusions.

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July 1, 2016
The key to writing about the ordinariness of life, which is the objective of most short story writers, is to isolate the distinctive detail about a person or event that speaks to both the universal and the uniqueness in every moment of every day. In her debut collection, McLaughlin, a prizewinning writer living in Ireland, achieves that perception to an unerring degree as she probes a dysfunctional, even bitter mother-daughter relationship (into which the girl's teacher is dragged); explores a family situation in which the daughter's return home for a visit necessitates the husband returning to his wife's bed; and portrays a young Irish woman, Lily, at a crucial juncture. When Lily shares a train compartment in Italy with a young Italian woman, Lily's subtle advances are rebuffed, leaving her with a sense that this humiliation would wait for her in the long grass of memory. The other stories are equally eloquent, sensitive, and easy to abide; librarians would be wise to hand this collection to fiction readers still unconvinced they can connect with the short story form.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2016

How many first-timers have won the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, the Willesden Short Story Prize 2013, the Merriman Short Story Competition, and the Dromineer Literary Festival short story competition? Plus, McLaughlin is under contract for a full-scale novel. Here, the Irish author focuses on fraught relationships and those sudden, illuminating moments that can light ordinary lives.

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