Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’. McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in...

  I ignored them for months, but the paranormal investigators insisted on my attention. It was not entirely unflattering. First came the emails I dismissed as spam, then a slew of bizarrely worded DMs which appeared among sex-bots in Instagram’s ominous ‘message requests’ folder. Finally, on a rainy afternoon in January, I received a call from an unknown number. At the other end of the line was a man who introduced himself as Patrick, ‘a supernatural specialist’. He was, he assured me, a consummate professional – my privacy would be respected, my personal safety paramount. I was about to hang up, but lately the suspicion that nothing strange or extraordinary would ever befall my life again had grown stronger, and the possibility that I might continue living bereft of more unorthodox experiences filled me with great distress. Days were passing with nothing new in them. I sighed, I listened. Patrick...

Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair...

Molly Hennigan | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Ghost) is a book that, in a swift, sensitive movement, has achieved something that many people speak about, think about and slowly edge closer towards after years of scholarship and research. Across various interviews and within the folds of the text itself, Ní Ghríofa relays how she comes to the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill on the periphery of other paths that are well-worn. In Ghost, charting a timeline between the 1700s and the present moment, Ní Ghríofa traces the life of the poet Ní Chonaill through a series of personal reckonings. Stretching the text over the edges of her own experiences of motherhood and tragedy, she fills the gaps in our knowledge of the poet by listening out for echoes of her life today. Ní Ghríofa is not researching from within academia,...