This Way Up - Dermot Ryan, Nigel Quinlan

This Way Up is an anthology of short stories by two authors published by Aeon Press. The book is in the format of a split book, with one side showcasing stories of Nigel Quinlan, turned over and upside down it showcases stories by Dermot Ryan.

Nigel Quinlan

‘The Limerick Trilogy’ is a nice piece of work, blending the everyday with the supernatural. Mackey and Joe are two hardmen gangsters with the ability to strike fear into anyone who crosses their path, but they still have normal everyday issues to contend with. Mackey is a father who has to keep his kids in line, while Joe is on the lookout for a nice young girl, but is rather awkward around them. At the same time they both have special powers, connected with ley lines and druidic lore, that make them the most feared pair in the city. Good characterisation, it is familiar and unsettling at the same time. My only problem is that each of the stories are too short to properly develop characters or situations. Each of the stories follows the same formula of Mackey and Joe behaving like normal Irish blokes, confronting a threat and being forced to use their powers spectacularly. It’s great stuff – well-written with a real feel for the material - but I’d like to see this developed into a longer format, where more could be made of these characters.

I also liked ‘The Invisible Man Game’. Michael’s goes to school and on the first day he is terrorised by the Master, however his friend Jimmy has powers to exact a terrible vengeance on any Master who lays a finger on Michael. Again, the writer shows great affinity for the material, producing a vivid and authentic evocation of childhood – the fears, the excitement, the confusion.

I thought the latter two stories were less successful – ‘Another Thing Coming’ uses the same idea as ‘The Limerick Trilogy’ – mixing the everyday and the supernatural. This time the setting is a modern hospital which is having to cope with characters from Irish myths and legends filling up their wards with bodies. There are some nice lines of dialogue and amusing use of vernacular, but the humour and situation feels forced. Tom Holt does this sort of this much better. The final story ‘QBC’ features a Faustian pack with the Dublin Transport System. It didn’t really hold together for me.

Dermot Ryan

Ryan makes no bones about his influences in the introduction and the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges can be felt throughout his stories. Nothing wrong with that. In ‘The Burnished Egg’ Liam is an avid reader - or to be more precise, a vivid reader, projecting visions of what he is reading in an egg object above his head – very much a Borgesian ‘reality leak’. As he goes through Great Expectations and Treasure Island, the images become bigger and more life-like and Liam’s fame grows wider. Then he reads Paradise Lost, projecting a dangerous scenario in an ever more realistic and grander scale – but at a cost. It is all about the power of books to fire the imagination, and Ryan’s descriptions vividly put forward the case.

‘Thank You For This Day’ is another delightful story - a beggar is treated to a special day before he dies. This is an unashamedly traditional fairy-tale in the style of Oscar Wilde, and just as well-written. I didn’t like ‘Isolating the Element’ at all though, with its terribly obvious symbolism. A music teacher obsessed with a young female student, cries a seed into his pillow, which when he plants it, turns into an enormous plant. He is ashamed of the plant and tries to hide it from his overbearing mother. Unfortunately there is nothing more to the story than this – the man struggling with the huge plant - and just in case the symbolism wasn’t obvious enough, Ryan explains it for you in the last paragraph with the dreadful line – “And now she was in the garden, holding the twisted, thwarted root of her son’s sexuality in her hands”.

Best of the lot though is the last story, ‘The Last Laugh’. The narrator’s father has a stroke and is confined to hospital where he shows no signs of mental activity.  But he won’t let the man fade-out like that and is determined, much to the horror of the hospital staff, patients and his family, that he can bring him back. Straightforwardly told and clearly based on experience, this is a touching, heartfelt and moving story.