It’s eight years since the Irish writer Colin Barrett made a splash with his debut story collection, Young Skins, whose standout piece, Calm With Horses, about an ex-boxer working as the muscle for a grudge-bearing drug dealer, was turned into a well-received film of the same name. Homesickness is another finely crafted collection, again set largely on Barrett’s home turf of County Mayo, portrayed once more as a cauldron of alarming violence and simmering disappointment.
Crisply told, fond of an eye-catching flourish (pint glasses “honeycombed” on a pub table; a “sudsy” blowjob), the stories draw energy from the rhythms of west of Ireland small talk, added to Barrett’s eye for striking detail: witness the music leaking from the headphones of a gunshot victim in the opening story, or the barman who explains that his sunburnt neck is the result of falling asleep on his mother’s roof while listening to a mixedmartial arts podcast.
The Alps starts with the pub banter of three burly brothers but shifts gear when one of them returns from the gents, having “thrummed a sulphurous piss into the gurgling trough”, to find a sword-wielding stranger named Derek has joined the drinkers. Barrett plays the situation for off-kilter laughs as well as peril; a similar left turn animates Anhedonia, Here I Come, about a self-regarding poet who, out to buy weed from his regular dealer (a camogie-playing schoolgirl about to go straight), finds himself propositioned by a fellow customer, a man carrying a baby girl in a sling.
The scenarios are richly layered, with punchy payoffs. The Low, Shimmering Black Drone, about an unpublished writer paid to look after a novelist’s dogs during lockdown, is a smart bit of post-pandemic fiction that manages to send up the clamour for such a thing without compromising its emotional force. Barrett has any number of cute exit strategies: a story involving a delinquent school pupil ends with him falling asleep in front of a video game blinking “Do you want to continue?”, while the one about the gunshot victim ends with a cop reviewing her notes to write up the report of what we’ve just seen.
