“The girl, the creature, whatever she was, had the baby. She was cradling him in one pale arm, holding him close to her body. She was alien to the cosy room. White, sharp, somehow perfect. Becky looked down. What appeared to be a flimsy lace dress was long feathers. Her feet were concealed beneath, but as she swayed with the baby, Becky saw that they were bare and ended in talons. They stood in a tableau, with the music-box waltz winding slowly down.”
Mixing horror, legend and the supernatural, Tina Callaghan's second novel is a high-octane story set on an unnamed island off Ireland. Daughters of the Storm comes billed by its publisher, Poolbeg, as crossover fiction but a melodramatic plot and tendency to guide the reader place it firmly in the young adult genre. Oscar Wilde's remarks on sentimentality – desiring the luxury of an emotion without paying for it – are equally true of melodrama. For a book to be truly dramatic, the reader needs tension and, crucially, to care about the characters.
Callaghan achieves this in parts of her novel, and there is plenty within the covers to commend. She is a clever writer who uses primal instincts to get us to care about her characters. In a book with an omniscient narrator that flits over the lives of multiple islanders, the central character is non-islander Lia, a teenage girl who has come from New York to find out more about her late father, Will, who died from suicide some months previously. Will, born and raised on the island, left behind his heritage and his brother Harry to marry an American woman, Lia’s mother, Jasmine. Short passages that show Jasmine as a widow in New York are moving and well-written, and offer momentary respite from the drama on the island.
Gothic world
For although Lia is taken in by her uncle Harry, owner of the island's only pub, and soon finds herself a boyfriend in local boy Ed (a birdwatcher with a troubled domestic life), there are signs early on that all is not well on the island. Callaghan is an atmospheric writer who creates her gothic world with ease. A press release for the book plays up its connections with a well-known TV series – "the storm is coming" – but it is Callaghan's detail that brings the worlds of the dead and undead together. From Wexford, she writes supernatural fiction for children and adults, and her stories have featured in books and magazines with well-known horror authors Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch.
Sightseeing possibilities on the island include a trip to Devil’s Teeth, or the spooky old house, the Halls. Two chimneys are the first thing Lia notices when she gets off the boat from the mainland: “Looming towers of black rock and limestone, streaked with bird poop, much bigger than she had expected.” The culture and way of life on the island comes through in neat asides: “The summer people exclaim over the beauty of the island … This was, outside of the summer, a private place, with its own ways and its own secrets.” In the documenting of island life as a close-knit, troubled community, there are echoes of Bernie McGill’s excellent novel The Watch House, though the latter is more nuanced and finely crafted.
Murderous men
Two moderately compelling mysteries drive momentum in Daughters in the Storm. Why did Lia’s father kill himself? And more pressingly, what is going on with the numerous and interchangeable local men of the island, all of whom seem to be involved in violent, murderous activities of some sort? One story stands out as unique and interesting – a creepy father, Frank, puts his hand on his pregnant daughter’s belly and almost kills the child – but the others blend into each other and get lost amid the relentless drama of the second half of the book.
Pacing is not a strength of this novel and the breaks between scenes are rushed. One minute a group of islanders led by Lia are in the jaws of a creature known as the Strix, the next minute they’re back in the pub, huddled safely together. But where’s the baby?! Back out again into the storm we go.
Long quotes at the start of each chapter will feel random to adult readers (mostly from Dracula, but occasionally Francis Bacon or Flaubert), though they may inform or charm a younger audience. Certainly this is a novel for those who like drama heaped on drama, a book for younger readers, but for those who don't scare easily: "It was tangled with a mass of other corpses but it clawed its way free, its bones green with algae. A feathery frond was growing from an eye socket. Jasmine screamed, half sinking."
