Things get dark in this debut thriller
But Colin Barrett also digs deep into his characters’ psyches
In the wee hours of the morning, hulking teenager Devereaux “Dev” Hendrick, whose quiet demeanour results in him being mercilessly bullied at school, steals away from home to a quarry where he is determined to end his life. Suffering deep depression, the only thing that prevents him from throwing himself off the 20-foot quarry edge is his suspicion that the fall would not be fatal. As he sits contemplating eternity, he is accosted by a goat that creeps up on him through the dark.
The philosophical, vaguely surreal scene occurs almost exactly halfway through “Wild Houses,” the debut novel from acclaimed short story writer Colin Barrett. In the narrative present, Dev, now an adult living alone on an isolated property following the death of his beloved mother, finds his life upended when his cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, show up on his doorstep with a teenage boy in tow. The adolescent, Doll, is the brother of Cillian English, a local ne’er-dowell in hock to a crime boss named Mulrooney after a cache of drugs goes missing.
The narrative spine of “Wild Houses” has all the trappings of a thriller, but the nighttime quarry scene should give readers pause. Barrett, a native of Ireland’s County Mayo and now based in Toronto, is more interested in character than plot, and his story’s scaffolding is largely an excuse to delve into the psyches of Dev, Doll and Nicky, Doll’s 17-year-old girlfriend who works at a nearby pub called the Pearl.
Dev himself is something of a contradiction: despite his massive size — one character remarks that Dev’s hands resemble “excavator buckets” — he “leaves an awful dainty mark on the world,” preferring a reclusive life with his mother’s dog, Georgie, to active engagement with the outside environment. Which makes his involvement in Gabe and Sketch’s kidnapping and ransom scheme an unwanted intrusion into his self-imposed solitude.
Dev’s contemplative nature is in contrast to his cousins’ preference for action and predilection for violence.
Gabe is a former junkie whose heart stopped on two separate occasions; Dev inquires about what the experience of being clinically dead is like. “It felt like nothing,” Gabe tells him, to which Dev replies, “I just thought there might have been more.” That exchange prefigures the scene at the quarry, which finds Dev as a 16-year-old contemplating the transfiguring potential of his own demise: “For a moment, he imagined he was studying the feet of his own corpse. But he was still in his body. Where would he be if he was not?”
Matters of life and death abound for the characters in “Wild Houses,” many of whom are united in being forced to grow up before their time. Dev leaves school at 16 to take a factory job at his mother’s urging, while Doll, whose very name implies a child’s toy, struggles to maintain a stoic exterior in the face of his ordeal as prisoner. And at 17, Nicky has already been the focus of her much older boss’s unwanted sexual attention; she finds herself embroiled in Doll’s fate when Gabe accosts her at the Pearl and tells her to let Cillian know he has until the following Monday to deliver the cash or unspecified harm will befall his younger sibling.
As in his short fiction, Barrett proves adept at incipient violence, which here shades into bursts of actual violence as Cillian, aided by his mother, becomes desperate to find sufficient cash to pay off the Ferdias. If the violence in the book is actualized, it is also there on the level of the language itself. As Nicky closes the pub door on a moment of danger unfolding in the parking lot, she lets go of the handle “as carefully as if she were letting go of the bladed end of a knife.” Elsewhere, there are references to “a sky of bruised cloud” and street lights that cast “a yellow glow so hazy it seemed a kind of malign diffusing gas.”
Throughout, Barrett’s language is tightly controlled and propulsive, shuttling his story back and forth in time and pushing inexorably forward toward a deliberate confrontation between the Ferdias and Cillian. The fact that Dev does not feature in the book’s climax may seem like a misstep, but the novel never sets him up to be a heroic man of action; his final moments in the story seem to underscore his desire to remain a solitary recluse, intentionally removed from his cousins and their milieu.
The final chapters of the novel could reasonably be accused of coming across as anticlimactic, but this does little to diminish the effect the narrative has until that point. And they may, in fact, only underscore Dev’s epiphany following his encounter with that goat at the quarry: “(A)ll he could do now was go back into his life. It was a pitiful little life, but it was his.”