Spine chilling stuff

TEENAGE FICTION: ANNA CAREYreviews New Town SoulBy Dermot Bolger Little Island, 247pp, €8.99

DERMOT BOLGER’S first book for young adults is many things. It’s a gripping thriller set in the south Dublin suburb of Blackrock. It’s an unsettling supernatural horror story. It’s a tenderly evocative look at teenage friendship and romance. It’s a reminder to be careful what you wish for. And it’s the story of Joey, a shy teenager whose ambitious musician father died in a car crash when Joey was a baby. Joey dreams of following in his father’s footsteps, but after a school talent show he’s bullied so badly that his mother takes him out of the school.

On his first day at his new school Joey meets a fellow new boy, the charismatic Shane. Shane is an independently wealthy orphan who’s just moved back to Ireland after living with an aunt in England for a few years. He’s charming and friendly, and everyone in the class, including Joey, falls under his spell – apart from one girl, Geraldine. She and Shane were friends when he first moved to Blackrock from Sallynoggin, two summers ago, but now she wants nothing to do with him.

There’s been something not quite right about Shane ever since that summer, when he and Geraldine met a mysterious old man called Thomas, who lives alone in his derelict former family home. When Thomas was a boy his doctor told him about changelings – not the traditional wicked-fairy babies who replace stolen human children but supernatural forces that take over a person’s body, bringing the souls of all their past victims with them. Is Shane now one of these changelings?

As the book progresses the narrative switches seamlessly between Joey’s burgeoning friendship with Shane, Shane’s first summer in Blackrock and Thomas’s youth in the 1930s. The story is perfectly paced; as he moves back and forth in time Bolger feeds us just enough information to make us aware of what’s really going on with Shane while withholding enough of the truth to keep us eager to find out how the story will end.

The novel also manages to be genuinely creepy, which is not easy to pull off. Plenty of writers can evoke cheap thrills, but only a few can inspire the unsettling cold-water-down-the-spine feeling engendered by several scenes in this book, notably one in which Thomas visits the cellar with Joseph, the mute servant, who reveals the dark secret lying beneath the house.

New Town Soulalso examines the idea of immortality, the different ways in which it can be achieved and whether it's a desirable state at all. The changeling's victims may get to live forever, but they're all trapped with the other lost souls. And their immortality is always granted along with a wish – but one that never comes true in the way they expect. Shane dreams of becoming rich, so his family's money worries will be over. But his fortune comes at an appalling price.

Joey dreams of achieving immortality through his music – when he is asked to join his schoolmates’ covers band he refuses, because “nobody ever became immortal by sounding like somebody else”. He gradually discovers that people can also live on through their children and that the immortality granted by musical success isn’t as important as “the miracle of a normal life”.

By turns chilling and tender, and always compulsively readable, New Town Soulis an excellent novel, and Bolger's distinctive voice is a welcome addition to the world of Irish children's fiction.

Anna Carey is a freelance journalist