The dead house

IN AN ISOLATED thatched cottage on a cliff at the edge of the sea in West Cork, where "even the air has wildness," four friends spend a boozy weekend celebrating the renovation of what was once an abandoned ruin in a spot so lonely it's "too easy to glimpse things." For entertainment, they've improvised a Ouija board. What could possibly go wrong? Michael Simmons is a London art dealer who has nurtured the career of Maggie Türner, a gifted young artist. After she was attacked by a violent boyfriend and needed to change her life, she departed for Ireland, where she believed she could heal and find herself again. On the wild Beara Peninsula, Maggie discovered an abandoned cottage. Though the estate agent tried to persuade her to look elsewhere, with money from Michael she bought the place and engaged builders to make it habitable. "No artist could begin to hope for more than what she'd found," Michael explains, "spectacular views of beaten hills and ocean, huge skies and, best of all, the light, a strange spectral light, peculiarly heavy and in a constant state of flux. Just breathing this air made you want to cry and laugh at the same time." When Michael travels to West Cork for what promises to be a bucolic housewarming weekend, Maggie introduces him to two Irish friends: Liz, a poet from Galway, and Alison, a Dublin art dealer Michael has met before. They knock around the countryside, enjoying the landscape, the food and their long conversations, especially Liz's stories of the Irish past and its folklore. "History haunted the present in places like this," she tells them; "the incessant closeness of so much storied past tended at times to skew the definition of reality." Michael, who soon falls for Alison, has his own reality-challenging moments, with fleeting glimpses of a young woman standing on the rocks, "a flicker of whiteness" that vanishes so quickly he isn't sure what or whom, if anything, he has seen. Does he believe in ghosts? Then Liz sets up the homemade Ouija board. The festive atmosphere shifts rapidly to one of darkness and dread as the improvised shot-glass pointer spells out one word after another in Irish and English and Maggie begins speaking in a stranger's voice, that of a sinister presence, telling a horrifying story of hunger, depravity, murder and suicide. "The dead refuse to rest, or even to lie still," Michael has asserted at the outset. The novel shifts into a minor key of doomy disquietude as events unfold. Has Maggie given herself completely to the malevolent presence in her cottage? What dark spirit has been unleashed? And how far can it reach? These are the unanswerable questions that have prompted Michael to tell this story, years later, when he admits, "I've already lost a lot, but there's always more to lose." "The Dead House" is an oddly anachronistic tale - Michael seems neither to carry a mobile phone nor to think of calling for help when he discovers unspeakable devastation - with the haunting sensibility of a Daphne du Maurier mystery. The exquisitely rendered terrain and atmosphere of West Cork and its infinite varieties of weather are far more sharply drawn than are the elements of the somewhat less authentic emotional landscape. But although the portentous air isn't entirely earned, still you keep reading, half-believing that dark forces are stirring, the way you might feel a planchette sliding across a Ouija board. Is it really happening? Or are you convincing yourself there's more going on here than there really is? Either way, you enjoy the creepy thrill. Katharine weber is the Richard L. Thomas visiting professor of creative writing at Kenyon College. Her sixth novel, "Still Life With Monkey," will be published in August.

An unspecified something that has just occurred prompts retired artists' agent Michael Simmons, the English narrator of Irish author O'Callaghan's chilling, beautifully written first novel, to tell a story he has tried to forget. Flash back nine years to a housewarming party hosted by painter Maggie Turner, a client of Michael's, who has recently bought and fixed up, with his financial assistance, a rundown cottage on the west coast of Ireland. Maggie has invited Michael and two other friends to visit for several days. One evening at the beach, Michael spots a "flicker of whiteness" that he thinks might be a woman, an image that takes on sinister overtones after he learns of a grim bit of local history. O'Callaghan combines his gift at describing settings ("the casual filthy-white scatter of sheep flecking the distance, the tumbling ground a desperation of greenery, thick as pond-scum in parts") with subtle suggestions that something unnatural is going on. Fans of psychological thrillers with a ghostly undercurrent will be richly rewarded. Agent: Svetlana Pironko, Author Rights Agency (Ireland). (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.