McNamee's 'The Comets' finds dark beauty in fractured lives

Eoin McNamee's new collection of short stories, The Comets, pulls you into a world of people who have already fallen or never had much chance of standing upright. The title works because his characters orbit in strange, lonely paths—most without a home to return to, most without the inner quiet that might offer them a moment's rest. They live in a state of constant pressure, always braced for the moment when everything tips into violence, when the careful balance collapses.

McNamee, the Down-born novelist best known for Resurrection Man, has a gift for placing you inside the minds of the broken without asking you to look away. His dialogue sounds like it has been pulled from the ground itself, rough and true to the places that shaped it. One moment a line might sound almost musical; the next it catches you like a snare. He wraps these stories in storms and difficult weather, using the elements to shake loose what his characters are trying to hold together. The boundary between pleasure and pain becomes something they stumble over without seeing.

The collection is thick with recurring images—silk, snow, dust, cigarette burns on tables, the stains of spilled drinks. There is a strange magical realism at work too, the weightlessness of wings set against the grinding, soul-wearing labor of industrial work. Death appears on nearly every page, sometimes with what McNamee describes as a thick sherbert smell. His characters are caught in a paradox: many of them want desperately to be found, yet they also wish to disappear. One line captures this perfectly: "If there was a realm of bad choices she would be queen." They seem almost predestined to suffer—by poverty, by ignorance, by intolerance, by the accident of being born into the wrong place or the wrong family.

In one story, children with no shoes walk through snow to a local church looking for food. They leave beads of blood in their footprints. The church turns them away hungry. In another, a young woman sells her body to long-haul truck drivers, trapped in a cycle she cannot name her way out of. McNamee's ear for how people actually speak is as sharp as ever, and he has learned to materialize menace in the smallest gestures—a look in someone's eye that promises nothing good. He writes movingly about those born into destitution, about care workers moving like dim figures at the edge of what children allow themselves to see, about the rule that you never look up, because looking up is likely to earn you a blow to the head.

The collection is strongest in its shorter pieces. Quo Vadis stands among the finest, delivering dramatic turning points in a single paragraph where another writer would have sprawled across pages. But the two longest works—Love in History at seventy pages and The Last of Deeds at nearly one hundred—feel less certain. Love in History, set in wartime Belfast, buries itself under too much metaphorical description. The Last of Deeds, wrestling with small-town sectarianism and the struggle of coming of age, carries the weight of its own importance too heavily. There is a moment in The Road Wife that strains credibility: a woman selling sex leaves her handbag in a truck cabin while she goes to the toilet, a choice that feels unlikely under any circumstances, let alone hers.

Yet by the time you close The Comets, the collection has left something heavy in your mind. The light you see as you finish is appropriately streaky and dim, because McNamee is unafraid of darkness. The titles alone—Corpse Flowers, Sable—tell you where you are headed. But there is a strange pleasure in being blown around by these stories, like stepping outside into a storm and not knowing what or who you might encounter in the wind.