BY BETHANNE PATRICK

MIKE McCORMACK lives in Galway, Ireland, on a seacoast facing the Atlantic with rocky, unforgiving cliffs that give way to thin, hardpan soil. As the author describes it, the western edge of Europe sounds a bit like the American West.

“This is a fishing village, very beautiful and very rough around the edges,” McCormack says via videoconference. “For all our kind of artyness and urban polish and everything like that, there is still this rough hinterland very close. Being in the west, we like to see ourselves as wild and untamed and untamable.”

McCormack’s 2017 novel, “Solar Bones,” was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In his new one, “This Plague of Souls” — set, like its predecessor, in western Ireland — a man named Nealon returns home from a prison to find his wife and child gone, their house stripped down to its bare bones. His mobile rings: a call from an anonymous man. Nealon has to act, but he’s completely alone in the world. What comes next?

“It’s difficult to impress upon anyone how important the idea of cowboys was to my father’s generation,” says McCormack. “Those solitary, strong, square-jawed men who rode tall in the saddle and had codes of honor and all that.” His father’s library of such books — by Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, Zane Gray — heavily influenced McCormack’s imagination. “By the time I was 12 or so, I was more familiar with the Mojave Desert than with various parts of Ireland.”

It should be noted that McCormack is not by any means a writer of westerns; his work is much harder to categorize. “Solar Bones” was touted for consisting of a single sentence — although McCormack says it’s actually “a few clauses, in a sentence that has begun long before you open the book, and goes on long after you close the book.” “This Plague of Souls” is tightly structured, with elements of noir. “Notes