A debut that whips up a skilfully spooky tale

FICTION: The Dead House, By Billy O’Callaghan, Brandon, 12.65

All ghost stories are about the past. It follows that ghost stories are often rather old-fashioned (a polite word for old-fashioned is “traditional”), and Billy O’Callaghan’s debut novel, The Dead House, is a traditional ghost story – in other words, it is a novel about the ways in which the traumas of the past can bubble up and infect the present. As O’Callaghan’s narrator, ...