Then she did something I wished she had not. Reaching into her cloak she pulled out a copy of that accursed book that I wish I had never seen or begun to contrive. When I bring to mind the thousands of wasted hours it represents, the mausoleum made of paper, the hundreds of miles I walked in its wretched company, I hate myself for ever having been born with the storytelling disease and having squandered, in its service, whatever life I was intended to live.
‘This work is your country,’ she said. ‘Is it no consolation?’
It took every famished fibre of the little manliness I have remaining not to seize the book from her hands and hurl it out the window. Followed by her. And me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It is not’. (O’Connor 232)
History
Publication
Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Jarlath Killeen, and Christina Morin (eds),
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Rights
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion following peer review. The version of record " Killeen, Jarlath, and Christina Morin, 'Introduction: Exorcising the Dead, Summoning the Living', in Jarlath Killeen, and Christina Morin (eds), Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion" is available online at:https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399500555.003.0001