‘ Wild Houses’ is an electric thriller built on tense moments

Ron Charles

Barrett, who moved to Ireland as a child, has spent more than a decade publishing short stories. His first collection, “Young Skins” (2013), won several awards, but with this lithe novel, he’s sure to find a wider audience. With his own distinctly Irish inflection, he writes character-driven stories in which miserable people are afforded a degree of attention their fellows will never accord them.

The audiobook version of “Wild Houses,” narrated by a Sligo-born actor named Damian Gildea, sounds terrific, but it’s hard to compete with reading the text yourself. Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face.

The action takes place during the Salmon Festival, a week-long celebration in Ballina, County Mayo, with music, parties and fireworks. But we enter the story out in the countryside at the funereally quiet home of Dev Hendrick. Lying on his sofa in the dark, this giant of a man could be dead for all anyone can tell, but nobody ever drops round. “He lived in the middle of nowhere,” Barrett writes, “he never left the house and he lived alone.” Although such physical and social isolation may be sapping the life out of him, it’s a selling point for the local drug boss, who uses Dev’s place as a holding station for “product.” That arrangement suits Dev just fine, but the benefits of passive income are about to get squeezed hard.

Through the night rain, a car drives up to the house. Two thugs have arrived, the Ferdia brothers: one freighted with “the curated muscle of a gym freak,” the other “with a face on him like a vandalised church.” They reek of feral aggression, their moments of courtesy simply a pose of sarcastic playacting. “You could never tell what lines they would elect to cross,” Barrett writes, “because they did not know either.”

They’ve brought the latest contraband for Dev to store in his spooky basement. But it isn’t the usual sports bag of drugs; it’s a terrified teenage boy. “He would have looked like any young fella you’d see shaping around the town on a Friday night, punctiliously spruced for the disco,” Barrett writes, but he’s already been roughed up a bit, and his nickname, Doll, doesn’t do much for his efforts to put on a tough face.

“I shouldn’t be here,” the boy says.

None of these people should be here. But this fresh cycle of violence has already been spinning for a year. Doll didn’t do anything to start it. The thugs just picked him up off the street to put pressure on his slick older brother, who lost 30,000 euros of cocaine. He’s made an effort to pay back almost half that debt, but now it seems he needs a little more inducement to come up with the balance. Maybe holding his little brother hostage will improve the whole family’s concentration.

The craft of “Wild Houses” shows a master writer spreading his wings – not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality, perfectly drawn vignettes that capture the lives of people caught in this deadly trade.

Barrett cleverly constructs his novel so that we learn of Doll’s kidnapping immediately, while his friends and family hover for hours in a cloud of ignorance and confusion, sensing trouble before they know what’s amiss. Doll’s astute girlfriend, Nicky, is pressing up against the limits of being patient in a town that offers a selection of lads who range from alcoholics to jerks. She isn’t sure she wants to keep dating Doll – surely, if she can get there, college will offer better partners – and yet she feels an unshakable duty to save him from whatever might be wrong. Just 17 years old, she’s essentially the only adult in the room and the novel’s savvy heroine.

But the real focus of “Wild Houses” remains Dev, this gentle accomplice to a kidnapping – and possibly worse. Even before his beloved mother died, he’d become a kind of human sinkhole. Now, rather than keep her memory alive, he’s entombed them both in his misery. He still hoards her old prescriptions in a Tupperware tub in the kitchen. Recollections of the bullied childhood that produced this shattered man are devastating; the portrayal of Dev’s adult life is perhaps the most harrowing description of loneliness I’ve ever read. And I’ve read all the novels of Anita Brookner.

Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life – even touches of humor – may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.

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Wild Houses

By Colin Barrett

Grove. 255 pp. $27