Muckross Abbey and Other Stories
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“I binge-read this book, savoring the gothic creepiness at the heart of each tale. Packed with compelling, nuanced lives and the deaths that haunt them, each story is a séance—an invitation for unsettled spirits to let their presence be known, ‘desperate for someone to supply the narrative.’ Murray supplies it with great style and an uncanny knowingness, leaving room for our imagination to fill in the suggestive spaces with our own dark dread.”—Mona Awad, author of All’s Well
Sabina Murray has long been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in Muckross Abbey and Other Stories, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Australian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable.
From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ghosts haunt this smart if repetitive collection from Murray (The Human Zoo). In "Apartment 4D," a highlight, the 20-something narrator becomes obsessed with the strange and possibly spectral behavior of a single mother and daughter who live down the hall from her. The equally strong "Remote Control" involves a vacationing man and his wife, who are irked by the TV in their room, which switches on every night at two a.m. Here and elsewhere, a ghost ends up shaping the proceedings. Even the dialogue-driven "First Cause," which has a less paranormal vibe than the others and mainly involves a couple's argument about their unhappiness, introduces a ghost. Over time, unfortunately, the formula loses its impact. After the protagonist of "The Third Boy" gets locked out of her home, for instance, it's not hard to suspect that the unsettling neighbor who takes her in may not be fully human. Still, on their own, Murray's gothic stories pulsate with ornate prose ("The house was so silent that one understood how quiet and still could be synonyms"). Each story has plenty of spookiness and intelligence, though with diminishing returns.
