Colin Barrett is a master of the short story format, exploring the Badlands of Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast.

Commercial success, though, seems to require a novel and I was fearful of the sacrifices he might have to make to stretch out a narrative.

Fortunately, Rough House requires its length but does not dilute the spirit of the short stories.

Despite being set in modern Ireland, its structure has many similarities to a Western, with drug-related debts leading to kidnappings and ransom deadlines.

But there is also room for a fascinating character called Dev, who was bullied in school and still suffers but who has a loose connection to the baddies. His gentle presence makes for an even more taut thread as the ransom deadline approaches. The victim’s girlfriend is very well fleshed out.

Great dialogue, believable characters, and a clear plot make Wild Houses a very enjoyable read. A sure hit.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for this ARC of 'Wild Houses' by Colin Barrett.

I hadn't read any of this author's previous work so was looking forward to exploring this novel.

It's set in contemporary Ireland, Ballina in Co, Mayo in the west of the country, among a group of mainly young people who become embroiled in a spontaneous kidnapping plot. Doll English is taken and held in Dev Hendricks' remote rural home by the psychopathic Ferdia brother as a means of extorting the remaining debt from his brother Cillian. Dev, an awkward (and underestimated) outsider, Doll's mother and his girlfriend - among others - are enmeshed in the drama that ensues.

This is a really delicate balance of humor, pain, pathos, heartache, and trauma. There's no pretension here, it's a tale of modern Irish small town life - drugs, drink, boredom, banality, love, fun, work, and play.

Coming from that background myself, though several decades ago, I recognized it and I loved it.

I can honestly say this is a book I've been waiting for without realising it. I read Young Skins last year and loved Barrett's style. His use of the Irish landscape and those inhabitants who are on the periphery of life is visceral at times. The short stories in Young Skins are a stark look at rural/small town life and I definitely wanted more of the same. Mr Barrett must have been listening.

Wild Houses is a reference to those homes where parties, drugs and general wildness occurs. In this book the Wild House belongs to Cillian English, one-timer dealer but now calmed down and living with his girlfriend, Sara. On Friday night Cillian's brother, Doll, his girlfriend Nicky arrive and the four head out to party. But halfway through the night Nicky (who has college ambitions) argues with Doll and the two part ways. Feeling contrite later Nicky goes looking for Doll at home but he is missing and he's not answering his phone.

Unfortunately for Doll he has fallen into the hands of Gabe and Sketch Ferdia who have a beef with Cillian. Doll ends up at the home of the quiet, shambling Dev, who only wants some peace in his life.

As the story develops we learn the reason for Doll's kidnap, why Dev just wants some peace and Nicky's part in a rescue mission.

What Colin Barrett does so well is this slow burn, underlying violence that roars into life when you least expect it. Having read Skins and watched Calm with Horses I spent most of the latter part of this book with my heart in my mouth on fear for the characters. You're certainly not guaranteed a happy ending with Barrett's characters.

I loved this book. I love a well written short story but sometimes you find a writer who leaves you thinking "but what now", "what happened to them then". To be fair, Colin Barrett could have extended this book another hundred pages and I'd still have wanted more. He either has a sixth sense (or some fine editor) to know just where to leave your audience wanting more.

Highly recommended. If you enjoy Irish lit fiction in general you'll enjoy this.

Thanks very much to Netgalley and Vintage Digital for the advance review copy.

I've been a fan of Barrett for a while now, having devoured his previous story collections, and so I was very eager for WILD HOUSES. It absolutely did not disappoint. It's a wild ride of a story, the sentences sing, there's humour. But it's the plot/story that kept me hooked. Cannot wait for whatever he writes next!

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

Wild Houses centres around the kidnapping of a teenage boy named Doll, to get back at his older brother, Cillian, who owes them money after a large sum of drugs may or may not have disappeared. Barrett’s writing is impressive and quiet but brought to life. The interconnection of everyone in the town, impactful and imperceptible, made it a captivating novel to read. Every character felt raw and either running from something or trapped. Any sort of pay-off felt earned and the uneasiness of the resolutions felt true to life.

> And though he had since reacquainted himself with certain habits  –  Gabe took a drink, took a smoke, and would take a hit of a joint if a joint was going – he still considered himself clean because he was off the heroin, and if that distinction was sufficient to meet the man’s definition of clean, well, fair enough so, was Dev’s opinion.

While the book might have become another *Trainspotting*, Barrett travels beyond superficiality and instead goes for gold by capturing what goes on in the stories. Irvine Welsh's highly contagious writing, seemingly inspired by Martin Amis, William S. Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson, has affected many young writers. Colin Barrett is not one of those.

This book describes the lives of a few young persons in Ireland. Short sentences seem to betray what aren't mundane existences; there's no calling out of morals, no shock tactics à la Bret Easton Ellis.

> He let the dog out the back door. The rain had stopped. The night air had that clean, stony smell it got after rain. Georgie trotted down the garden and Dev followed. The garden was big and empty, bordered by a concrete wall, invisible now in the dark. Dev trudged a good ways out into the grass. There was no dark like country dark, the blackness beyond the house so total that looking out across the back fields he could not tell where the earth ended and the sky began. All was void. At the bottom of the garden he turned back and faced the house. The lone burning rectangle of the kitchen window cast an apron of illumination a little way out onto the grass, but Dev was stood well beyond the reach of its glow. He took out his prick. He could hear Georgie nearby, truffling in the grass, divining his own spot in which to urinate. As he pissed, he tilted his head all the way back and looked straight up. There, in the farthest, purest reaches of the sky, the stars grew in distinctness and brightness until it felt like he could reach out and touch the cold phosphorescent centres of them. The arc of his warm stream wavered and guttered out. He shook himself off and zipped up.

At first, I felt as though the book would not carry through. Barrett, a very accomplished writer, has previously released short-story collections and here debuts with his first novel. To transition from short stories to the big picture is hard with all the immediate benefits one gets from writing short stories. Has Barrett, then, managed to write something different than one big selection of short stories that are tangled together?

The people in this book aren't two-dimensional, but they way they're written makes a lot of other books by other writers seem flat. There's enough subterfuge in Barrett's writing to both satisfy the hyperkinetic reader who wants easy payoff and the one not looking for simple kicks.

For me, getting into Barrett's style of writing always requires time and patience: it takes me, who usually reads biographies, politics, philosophy, music, and essays, a bit of leeway, after which everything's worth the effort. It's like trying to keep pace with a slightly erratic swimmer.

And, to answer my own question, does Barrett, then, work out the kinks required to write a holistically functioning novel? Well, yes and barely: while Barrett's writing style, in general, is nearly always very good in short breaths, the novel form is something into which he will likely grow. Some passages, for example, a brilliant one that takes in a pub, is an impressive piece of writing. However, it is fitted between passages that altogether make the book feel slightly...IKEA. Pieces have been picked because they're beautiful, perhaps not for their ability to fit together. That will surely come in the next book.

The main characters are both running and run-down, perhaps victims of ourselves, victims of capitalism, or...one thing this book did, was get me thinking about human conditions and how we end up in some of our situations in life, both the mundane and the extraordinary. Barrett isn't really a show-off and, paired with his raconteur abilities, that's how he rolls; think José Saramago meets William S. Burroughs.

Is this book worth reading? Absolutely.

In spite of a few telltale signs of a neophyte novelist, there's enough far-reaching and deeply humanistic writing here to not only last throughout the book, but also to keep me waiting for Barrett's next novel.

Wild Houses is a quiet novel of the quietly devastating sort. Its story is particular in its focus and scope: Ballina, west of Ireland, where a teenage boy, Doll, who's been kidnapped is brought to a house and held hostage for 3 days. The events of the story arrange themselves around the central rupture of this event, almost every character caught in its pull. There is Dev, the man whose house the boy is brought to; Nicky, the boy's girlfriend; Cillian, his older brother; Sheila, his mother. That the novel is so particular in its focus also drives home the nature of its rural setting: the ways its characters, even when they don't directly know each other, are inexorably bound up in each other's lives. What might be construed as a tight-knit community is figured here as less tight-knit and more stifling. As one character puts it: "it's fucked how quick it all twists together . . . when you go back a bit"--interconnectedness as liability.

Liability is a salient issue for a novel that, like Wild Houses, is very much concerned with violence. There's a tight rope that Barrett is able to walk so deftly here: the way the story is both about violence that is exceptional--a boy kidnapped and held hostage--and quotidian, absorbed into the landscape and its rhythms. When everything "twists together" so quickly, when interconnectedness becomes a liability, then culpability and complicity become murky affairs. To act for someone becomes to act against someone else; but to not act at all is itself a kind of complicity that, in effect, acts for someone and against someone else. That this violence takes place in the countryside is something to note, too. The countryside of Wild Houses is not one of idyll and serenity but of menace, the vastness of its landscapes a kind of blanket that, in its immensity, is able to at once absorb and eclipse violence.

Just as violence pervades Wild Houses, so, too, does loneliness--and it is such a poignant and heartbreaking novel in its depiction of that loneliness. Characters are bereaved, estranged, isolated; in a cruel way the central event of the novel brings them together, but violence has never been companionship, will never be nourishing. I was especially moved by the story of one of our two narrators, Dev. His loneliness and grief are so raw on the page, Barrett's portrayal of his mental health struggles, specifically his panic attacks, so keenly felt. There are some lines in the end of this novel that are just stunning in every sense of the word. They are exactly what I mean when I say it's a quietly devastating novel.

I've painted somewhat of a bleak picture of Wild Houses, but in Barrett's hands--in his fine, lucid, and wry writing--it's anything but. Barrett has definitely cemented himself as a new favourite author of mine and I can't wait to see more novels (and short story collections!) from him in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Press for the ebook. This wonderful short story writer has finally written his first novel and it’s pretty wonderful. Cillian is a local drug dealer who may or may not have lost a large stash of drugs to an extreme weather event, but, if he sold them and kept the money or what he says is actually true, his bosses don’t seem to care. They want their money. So to get Cillian’s attention, they kidnap his younger brother. The story is filled with equal parts heartache and humor as we follow the story from the kidnapped brother’s girlfriend and from the gentle giant whose house in the middle of nowhere the kidnappers are using to keep the young man. Loads of stories and violence soon follow.