Book Information

KEY POINTS 

Wide-ranging in style and content, displaying affinities with speculative authors from Kafka to the proponents of the ‘New Weird’. 

Includes the award-winning dystopian ‘Necrologue’, in which the eponymous, foul-mouthed collector of the names of the dead is galvanised by the realisation that their own name might be next. 

An underlying sense that human life, individual and collective, is lived, altered, and held to account in the shadow of other aspects of the world that may be concealed but are far from quiescent. 

DESCRIPTION

This short story collection showcases the variety and evolution of Maxwell’s writing. Low fantasy in the mould of the Flux Avellana or Muinbeo Chronicles series; slipstream tales in the fuzzy margins of the weird and the real; experimental ‘synaesthesic’ fiction where fragmented or non-linear narrative is echoed in the structure and visual layout of the text. 

‘Someone Had Been Telling Lies’ is linked to the ‘bureaucratic gothic’ world of the novel Hollowmen, with its encroaching weirdness and zero-sum games of sociopathic ambition. In a different register, ‘The Meaning of Frogs’ and ‘Hallowtide Boar’ also juxtapose the bureaucratic with the transformatively strange and unsettling. 

The stories ‘Battle Book’, ‘Thicker Than Blood’, and ‘Necrologue’ all partake, directly or tangentially, in the parallel ‘Hibernia Altera’ universe of the author’s fantasy novels. ‘Fleeting Fluctuation in Disorder’, ‘Hell Hath No Fury’, and ‘The Last March of the King of Laois’ are stand-alone pieces, all in one way or another concerned with the cessation and transformation of life. 

Maxwell’s mastery of language and style—lyrical, mordant, elusive, and savage in turn—is evident in all of the stories in the collection, nowhere more so than in the exhilarating apocalyptic bravura of the final story, ‘Each Tether Has its End’.

BACK COVER TEXT

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of despairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways. 

In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell's slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent.

More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links—environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.

KEY POINTS 

Kafka is an obvious point of reference, but readers have also found traces of Italo Calvino, Iain M. Banks, and M. John Harrison.

A complex work with shifting, interleaved narratives and a narrative voice that is by turns ironic, lyrical, savage, and witty.

In Hollowmen, the cruelty and indifference of humanity towards both its own members and other intelligences and entities constitute a hubris that calls down the nemesis of a new post-human order.

DESCRIPTION

Speculative literary fiction in a 'bureaucratic gothic' mode.

Stranded in Quettopolis, the capital of Bakhtinstan, Cuffe spends her days surviving the destabilized city, distributing her writing through the ancient Forest, and recollecting her last job as a ‘corporate orator’. An archivist is on her way to steal Cuffe’s writing. A writer is hiding out, with the papers they stole from the archivist. A murderer is in pursuit. The disregarded Forest is re-asserting itself.

The Mothman Institute’s mission is to protect endangered moths, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the Institute’s ‘Players’ and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. A senior Player, Caius, recruited Cuffe to create the rhetoric to underpin this new corporate vision. Cuffe, contemptuously confident, is disturbed by the oddnesses of the Institute—the punitive process with its absent defendant, the quarterly Hunt, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry.

Then the Institute is galvanised by the news that a breeding pair of a rare moth, thought to be extinct, has been discovered in a country in the middle of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions—the Mothmen trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one—not even Caius—has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement...

Under the influence of Beckett, Flann O’Brien and Kafka, Hollowmen uses disjunctive temporalities, narrative shifts, and intertextual polyphony to create an irreal depiction of a psychotic corporation and the aftermath of a seismic assertion of power and agency by the margins towards the centre.

"The frost-grey sun is just emerging over a dun line of trees, making a smeared lemon aureole behind a bolster of mist. The sky is still freckled with faint stars, gleaming dully. The imperceptible rising of the sun makes the sky look gauzy, an unpolished amethyst. It seems to me—and I no longer claim objective recall—that the morning on which I first arrived in Quettopolis looked much like this morning just breaking. One year ago. I was right at least that is was my last job."

KEY POINTS 

Set in the same low-fantasy 'Hibernia Altera' universe established in the author's Muinbeo Chronicles series.

Issues of courage, principle, moral agency and the need for (or dangers of) compromise are presented as arising naturally from character and action, rather than in a didactic manner.

Engaging, distinctive young protagonists; their struggles against or acceptance of the conventions and expectations that bind them; the choices they make when put to the test.

Presents the natural world as a place of beauty, adventure, danger, and power, at once  imperilled and autonomous, and with protectors both natural and supernatural.

DESCRIPTION

This low-fantasy book is the first in the Flux Avellana series. It focuses on the four Grace siblings, whose parents are ambitious professionals within a corporate and political system seeking to exert ever greater control over both the lives of its citizens and the natural world.

The three older children—the twins Bram the budding company man and Flann the bibliophile, and Villa the mutinous square peg—have very different characters and priorities. These are brought into antagonistic relief when a protest action of Villa's gets them grounded for the summer out in the sticks of the Hibernian midlands. 

However, the three children, with their stolid youngest brother Raftery, are soon plunged into danger and intrigue as the seemingly placid life at Cobwell Farm erupts into a conflict between opposing forces and wxorld-views in which science, magic and myth are inextricably intertwined. 

Part eco-fiction, part fantasy adventure with an admixture of Bildungsroman, this book repurposes Irish myth and fantasy tropes to create a vivid, exciting, and often lyrical tale of hubris and nemesis that is at its centre a paean to the power of nature.

BACK COVER TEXT

“So the actual reason I was calling you is because—get this—I am not going to Prague this summer at all. Surprise! Thanks, Villa. Just ruin my life for me.”

Villa Grace is in disgrace. Her expulsion from school has ruined the prospect of a family holiday in imperial Prague, where her mother is organising a conference. Two of her three siblings are barely speaking to her, as all four face into a ‘holiday’ sweltering on Cobwell Farm in the back of beyond of drought-stricken Hibernia.

But the power-hungry St. Maur Ker family has breached the border between mortal and sídhe for their own gain. Cobwell, on the threshold of myth, is about to become the centre of a battle between older, wilder forces and the technomantic ambitions of one of the empire’s great aristo–corporate clans.

Caught up in this conflict, the children are forced to face up to the dark underbelly of their parents’ corporate environment, and to confront their own conflicting ambitions and loyalties.

For readers aged 9+

KEY POINTS 

Should appeal to readers of Jonathan Stroud, Neil Gaiman, and Flann O’Brien.

Introduces the settings, story arc and cast of characters whose development will be charted in A Wild Goose Hunt and other, future, books in the series.

A richly realised and immersive world that seamlessly combines the fantastic and the everyday, set in an altered but recognisable version of our actual world.

Assured younger characters in a society where their agency is taken for granted.

Written in a style that is accessible to seasoned younger readers, but also exhibits a literary playfulness to accompany dedicated bookworms on their reading adventures. A crossover success, with adults as many of its biggest fans.

DESCRIPTION

Set in a fictional low-fantasy world that is both imaginary and deeply rooted in Ireland, this book is the first volume in the Muinbeo Chronicles series. It received very favourable critical attention for its fine writing and creative brio.

“Some of these stories really started decades, generations, ago, and now come to their close. New things begin to arise from the past, like phoenix feathers separating from the flame. The winding down of the old stories and the starting of the new arose from a death; a murder, if you will believe such wickedness. We warn you. We are the last—eh—people to pretend that Muinbeo is some kind of Island of the Blessed.”

Those enigmatic entities, the Storytellers of Muinbeo, know that History has something waiting in the wings. To set the scene for their audience, they relate a gripping tale about a death and its consequences. 

When her mentor is bitten by a rogue werewolf and “joins our hairy brethren howling at the moon”, apprentice detective Salmon Farsade is assigned to Hal McCabe, Detective Chief-Inspector and vampire, just in time for a murder. 

Fen Maguire has been stabbed, throwing the normally peaceful community of Ballinpooka into shock. The investigation into her death lifts the lid on more than just the name of her killer: political corruption, Outland conspiracy, academic deceit, and plain old-fashioned greed.

KEY POINTS 

Should appeal to readers of Jonathan Stroud, Neil Gaiman, and Flann O’Brien.

Builds on the settings and cast of characters established in Good Red Herring.

A richly realised and immersive world that seamlessly combines the fantastic and the everyday, set in an altered but recognisable version of our actual world.

Assured younger characters in a society where their agency is taken for granted.

Written in a style that is accessible to seasoned younger readers, but also exhibits a literary playfulness to accompany dedicated bookworms on their reading adventures. 

DESCRIPTION

Set in a fictional low-fantasy world that is both imaginary and deeply rooted in Ireland, this book is the sequel to Good Red Herring and the second in the Muinbeo Chronicles series.

Hunter Sessaire, a young member of the Sombrist religious community, is driven by curiosity to investigate what lies behind the attempted murder of a guardian of the community’s treasures. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is once again concerned about the incursion of Outland power-plays and politics into the supposedly secure land of Muinbeo. In A Wild Goose Hunt, many of the protagonists and characters of Good Red Herring reappear, and the history of the Outland in the wake of a centuries-old alien invasion is further fleshed out.

BACK COVER TEXT

“You did not tell the Abbess a single lie,” Diamond said, “but you didn’t tell her the truth.”

As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from a room within the Sombrists' Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place.

But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum. 

The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations outside, where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like. Not least when he begins to suspect that some of the uncanny events may have their roots in a controversial Outland archaeological dig in Aegypt… Once again we are led into a maze of mystery by those not entirely reliable narrators, the Storytellers, in this enthralling sequel to Good Red Herring.

For readers aged 9+