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Author: David O'Mahony

Halloween column: The joy of horror

Halloween column: The joy of horror

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We have been telling stories about the things that terrify us since time immemorial. We have done it in every medium ever invented, from oral campfire stories to religious illuminated manuscripts to wood etchings to cinema. There is no shortage of examples, and the beauty of horror (let’s just class it all as “horror fiction”) is that it is endlessly adaptable to the circumstances. Like science fiction, it’s a fantastic vehicle for social commentary, because you can make grotesque analogies…

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Fiction: Brotherly Love

Fiction: Brotherly Love

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(Originally submitted for the RTE short story competition) Richard would never forget the look on Coster’s face as he fell. The shock of despair, of hope turned to devastation.  They had been inseparable in their youth, so much so that people often asked who was the older brother. Richard’s more robust build and freckled face complemented Coster’s sleeker, paler features.  Coster’s family lived a few streets away but he seemed to spend very little time there. Or at least, in…

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Fiction: What Gets Left Behind

Fiction: What Gets Left Behind

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(Originally published here) It was a hard thing, being dead. Watching the rise and fall of the seasons without the heat of the sun on your face or the chill of a winter storm. Seeing the world change in flashes and cutscenes but with time standing still. Growing attached to the people living in your house (he always thought of them as lodgers) only to find them suddenly grown or gone. Most of all, Art just felt so very, very…

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Fiction: Life for a Life

Fiction: Life for a Life

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(Originally published here) Conway stood with the other parishioners, a thick crowd pressing in on each other and reeking of ostentatious piety and desperation. The decrepit church wasn’t the biggest, but droves forced their way in from Carey’s Lane every Sunday. A man six feet away was coughing as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did. Cholera had ripped through Cork a little more than ten years ago, carrying away thousands, including three of Conway’s children. Now…

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DeSantis oped in the Irish Examiner

DeSantis oped in the Irish Examiner

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The website has been quiet but I have not (yet) dropped off the face of the Earth. I’m currently 15,500 words into a novel having another 25,000 words or so of unfinished projects on the back burner. This is an oped I wrote for the Irish Examiner recently on Ron DeSantis and the abuse of history in the Florida school curriculum – it was written in the aftermath of the decision to start teaching so-called positives about slavery and, politics…

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: An appreciation

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: An appreciation

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Mary Shelley, or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, aka Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, will forever be among the stars in my library simply through the writing of Frankenstein, one of the first science fiction novels and the themes of which I’m going to explore a bit here. Bear in mind that she was 19 when she began writing it, and that it was published in 1818 when she was 21. While she is certainly respected, I, like this Guardian writer a few years…

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Published Irish Examiner bylines

Published Irish Examiner bylines

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While the pace of publication here has slowed it’s not from lack of writing. Rather, some of the pieces that began life as potential posts here have ended up in the pages (print and digital) of the Irish Examiner. I’m particularly proud of this one, written up to coincide with International Women’s Day. It was inspired by one of my female farming ancestors, my great grandmother Ellen Connolly, aka Ella Collins, aka “Granny Coll” to my mother and her siblings….

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St Patrick: More man than myth

St Patrick: More man than myth

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As we celebrate fifty shades of green and celebrate the most famous of Ireland’s patron saints, it seems only fitting to go back and look at what we know about Patrick himself. Stripping away centuries of myth and miracle, shamrock teachings and banishings of snakes, we can look at him through the lens of his own writings. They are the earliest extant texts from Ireland and there are two: His Confession, and a letter he wrote excoriating the soldiers of…

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Fiction: A scene

Fiction: A scene

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[Every now and again scenes from stories pop into my head, though I have not written them up as I should have, convincing myself that I will eventually have time to flesh them out into something more solid. I’m getting over that, scribbling out scenes which may come to nothing but which need to get out of my head one way or the other. This was handwritten at about 4am one day, it is presented here unedited] Isaac felt the…

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Change through small simple steps

Change through small simple steps

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Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s a well-trotted out phrase at this stage, used in all sorts of contexts to illustrate that anything and everything takes time. You could apply the phrase to Rome the city or Rome the empire, it makes no difference. In a world where we constantly need to have instant results it’s easy to forget the power of small changes and how they add up. It’s something I came across during lockdown, and it’s how…

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