Wild Houses by Colin Barrett: A Review

Long recognized as a proven short story writer (Homesickness), Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses is set over a single weekend in the small Irish town of Ballina, in County Mayo. Crowds have arrived for the annual Salmon Festival. The cast is largely limited to two groupings: the English brothers, Cillian and Donal (or Doll, sometimes referred to as “the kid”), together with the kid’s girlfriend (or beore), Nicky, an orphan; and the Ferdia brothers, Gabe and Sketch, who, in order to recover a drug deal, kidnap the kid and conceal him in the house of their cousin, Dev (Devenaux) Hendrick.

A theme of abandonment suffuses the story. Nicky was raised by a brother after her parents died when she was young. Dev’s beloved mother has recently died while his mentally ill father wanders about town trying to press strangers into laying bets for him at the track; Doll and Cillian were long ago abandoned by their father and left in the care of their mother.

Once Nicky learns of Doll’s situation, it becomes her quest to find him. She becomes the soul of the novel. She and Doll’s brother, Cillian, hatch a plan to steal funds from her employer to rescue Doll. The reader can rest assured that this will not be the last novel by Barrett. He proved with his short stories, especially Young Skins, that Wild Houses will not be his last.

As well-known Irish author Roddy Doyle describes it, “vivid and wild, and chilling—Wild Houses is the business.”