Ihave recently fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s short stories! This collection contains her earliest published works. Some of the stories are strange and leave me wondering what the point of such grotesqueness was. More than once, I flipped back through the story to skim it again so that I can understand the action better. Consistently, stories have a twist at the very end that makes each word of an entire meandering piece come together in perfect sense.

Some stories are gothic in that their absurdity drives their appeal. Often, each tale contains an element of dark horror, too. These carefully crafted stories are not for the feint of heart. No haunting topic is skipped: Murder, suicide, abuse, and affairs are all covered here. They’re ripe for entertainment about a scary world.

I prefer her recent work Small Things Like These for a more serious subject, but this collection shares all the narrative twists endemic throughout her work. It’s no surprise, 25 years after her debut, that Keegan’s work is well-read the world over! ( )

I have previously read Small Things like these and Foster, both of which were in my best books of the year. This is an earlier work and I think it shows a writer exploring her range rather than one who has found her forte.
In any collection there are some stories that will be better than others, and so it is here.
There is more action in some of these than in her longer format work, in some of them the presentation of not a lot happening beautifully well described is there, though and these were the ones I found the most arresting. Some of them tetter on melodramatic, and it doesn't work as well. Having said that, as a collection, there is a lot to enchant. ( )

You have to face the worst possible scenario, then you’ll be able for anything.

You’ll come across this line in the fifth story in this collection and think, ah, is that what we’re doing then. Or so I did. The first third or so of the collection is a sketchbook of scenarios featuring women and girls trying to find escape from unhappy, oppressive family life and in the course of such seeming to jump from the frying pan into the fire. A married woman sleeps with a stranger and ends up handcuffed to his bed, gagged, a prisoner. A woman falls in love with a married man who spurns her and spends a decade doing a Miss Havisham. A young teenage girl seduces her family’s farmhand and he goes and hangs himself from the guilt, her discovering his soiled dead body.

For a while the main message I was getting was one of conservative sexual ethics, one that warns of terrible consequences resulting from women straying outside the bounds of the straight and narrow, however justified she may feel in doing so. The collection opening title story especially gets this reading off and going. But then it seems to have rather been the imagining of the aforementioned worst possible scenarios at the start, something like “The Road” for female struggle against the patriarchy, and we then get an adolescent girl who declares, “It’s turning out that I’m taking no nonsense from anybody”, and she ends the story fine! Ah, what a relief.

Indeed the next number of stories that follow generally feature women exercising agency, grabbing for independence, and making out okay. The middle stories “Quare Name For A Boy” and “Ride If You Dare” stand out in this regard. In the former a woman becomes pregnant from a short fling and after telling the man, realizes:

Suddenly I don’t want you, won’t keep you away from the boys and your smoky snooker nights. I’ll drink this parting glass, but at the end of the night I’ll shake your hand. I’ll be damned if I’ll snare you like a fox, live with you that way, look into your eyes some night years from now and discover a man whose worst regret is six furtive nights spent in his mother’s bed with a woman from a Christmas do. Suddenly I wonder why I came.

Thinking of the women she’s known and their relationships with men, she knows she will not continue that pattern. “That part of my people ends with me,” she thinks. And she’s fine!

“Ride If You Dare” is the first of a few stories in the collection’s back half that are set in the American South, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Keegan does a fine job with that idiom, as odd as it is to find stories that almost sound like Flannery O’Connor in the middle of all the Irish ones. The profit of Keegan’s years studying at Loyola University in New Orleans. Provides an interesting varied note, for sure.

The collection ends with a psychologically brutal story of a couple after their young daughter goes missing, which is one of the finest stories in the collection but will surely make any parent of children squirm in painful empathy.

Keegan’s writing throughout is powerful and direct. Highly recommended. ( )

I've read four of Keegan's collections and this is the most varied, with some stories set in the US. I prefer the Irish ones, with new words to learn and blundering men to resent. My favorite here is "Quare Name for a Boy". This one will be discussed at my upcoming book club meeting. I'm eagerly awaiting explanations of exactly what makes her stories so intensely good. I think it is partially her ability to state exactly what Irish men are feeling, which is mostly bald-faced hatred of women and of their own need for women's labor and fertility. ( )

More short stories. I am a glutton for punishment! The title is strange and needs a little work to link to the stories other than being obviously included in the first one. The thing about short stories is I find I have to work really hard to find the links or themes in the book - I'm not an experienced short story reader and so it takes time.

The first story is about a woman, happily married we are told several times, that wants to experience sex outside of her marriage and so goes out to find it one weekend. She manages to pick up a man who is described as generous in everything and is seduced into staying longer than she should. But as soon as Keegan mentions that he was the 'least threatening man she had known' you know that this is not going to end well and it doesn't. It's quite depressing in that a woman goes out to find her sexual freedom and suffers as a result. The other story that relates to freedom is Quare Name for Boy where the young woman becomes pregnant and moves to England where she finds she is free to become a writer and then rewrites her family. She 'turned them inside out like dirty socks'. So for neither of these women is freedom found inside marriage or even Ireland.

There are a couple of stories where innocence is lost. In The Singing Postman, post and fish are delivered in exchange for sex until it is discovered that a Fred West character lived next door and the younger sister is awakened to the danger of the world and some men (and women). The postman calls no more after this discovery. In the Ginger Rogers Sermon the girl slowly becomes aware that not everything in her family is the same as others. Through a friend she discovers that it not every mother and father sleep in separate rooms. She intervenes between her father and a woman he is dancing with because she 'knows' that it isn't right and in doing so liberates her mother to ignore her father, something she wouldn't normally do, and to drive off, leaving him standing at the gate. She learned to drive by watching televison as she hadn't been able to do so driving the car.

These are well-written stories but I still don't enjoy this format. ( )