AONGHUS FALLON

I live up in the Wicklow Hills, where I spend my spare time in my study writing or being pestered by one of my three cats. My work is all fantasy/horror, and nearly all of it has an Irish dimension. My influences are Flann O'Brien, Sheridan le Fanu, Irish Mythology and C. S. Lewis amongst many others.

I often try to surprise the reader by turning a premise on its head, by repurposing old tropes in unusual ways or by taking a familiar tale and subverting it. So Simulacrum has a Philip K. Dick premise, but is set in rural Ireland in the Fifties. In BookBound, the Arabesque world of the Crimson Planet is contrasted with the drab reality of 70’s Dublin and by the accompanying reminder that while one world is real, the other is not. The two books that inspired my Tir-Na-Nog sequence will be familiar to most readers. In the case of The Last Steward of Tir-na-Nog, I was struck by how the original book was about a colonial siding with the colonised despite being written by a colonist who - I reckon - would never have done any such thing.

The Wanderings of Balthus concerns the eponymous hero’s search for the woman who is his creator and his nemesis, but is Balthus really the hero he believes himself to be?

Finally I have one collection out - Over the Gate & Other Stories - dealing mostly with the supernatural and the eerie rather than the fantastic. The four short stories that are not part of this collection are available for free online. The longest is A Sleepy, Simple Man, a revisionist version of a famous Irish legend, The Burning of Da Derga’s Hostel. The original tale describes the downfall of a high-king after he breaks the taboos ensuring he stays in power. My version is written in modern Irish vernacular and also has Conaire less as a noble victim and more as a man who made some questionable life choices. The remaining three are short enough to constitute flash fiction and I like to think they pack a certain punch despite (or because ) of their brevity. Monkey Business is a modern re-working of Green Tea, a famous horror story by the Anglo-Irish author Sheridan le Fanu. Jerusalem is a tale in the Lovecraftian vein about a group of penniless dropouts who open a portal to a place best not visited, while The Little People is an unorthodox spin on the subject of the Sidhe and what they really might be like.