Set in and around the small town of Glanbeigh, Ireland, Colin Barrett's debut collection of short stories plunks readers deep in the nightlife and gritty underbelly of Glanbeigh's seedier side. His male characters are tough, hard-drinking thugs, drug dealers and general losers. The women these men ogle are just as hard, often saddled with kids born out of wedlock, who titillate the men out of boredom or in the hopes of a free drink. Barrett uses expressive details to instill a raw energy into his characters and sum them up in very few words, like his description of Nubbin Tansey, a "town tough and marginal felon" who enters a bar wearing a T-shirt, "exposing veined biceps as tough and gnarled as raw root vegetables." His two bodyguards are "twin slabbed stacks of the densest meat, their breezeblock brows unworried by any worm of cerebration."
Although the spiraling cesspools that constitute their day-to-day existence threaten to suck them in deeper and deeper, the characters are striving to do something decent and genuine with their lives. In "Calm with Horses," a young father named Arm makes a point of interacting with his handicapped son, even though Arm has just beaten up a child molester and is headed to conduct a drug deal. The boy in "The Clancy Kid" declares his love for a girl who has already denounced him. Despite their toughness, rough edges and use of foul language, Barrett's characters are likable, and they show a side of Ireland many may not be familiar with. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer