#tracy fahey

With the whole COVID-19 pandemic going on, there’s been plenty of time for DLS Reviews to get on with some horror book dissections.  Next up we have Irish author Tracy Fahey’s short story collection ‘The Unheimlich Manoeuvre’ (2016).  Described as “a modern-day gothic” the collection contains an eclectic mix of dark and provoking shorts that’s sure to please whilst you’re locked away in the relative safety of your homes…

You’ll note the review also includes, for the first time ever, a ‘DLS Summary’ at the very end of the story-by-story dissection.  It’s something which a number of readers and publishers have asked about for reviews on anthologies and short story collections.  We listened and going forward will now provide these final thoughts on all such reviews for collections of this nature.  As always, DLS Reviews appreciates all your feedback and suggestions.

Remember kids, stay indoors, keep reading, and stay safe…

Writing the fairy fort by Tracy Fahey

With her first novel for Fennec being published on Thursday, Tracy Fahey discusses writing ‘The Girl in the Fort’ over on her blog.

Here’s a little about the book: Set in rural Ireland of the 1980s, The Girl In The Fort is a novel about fables, friendship, family and fairy forts. After her father takes a job abroad, eleven year old Vivian is sent from Dublin to stay with her grandparents in…

Are you ready to join us in the Fairy Fort?

It’s here! All of us here at the Fennec Den are so excited to announce the publication of ‘The Girl in the Fort’ by Tracy Fahey, with the beautiful cover by Jacob Stack. 

Set in rural Ireland of the 1980s, The Girl In The Fort is a novel about fables, friendship, family and fairy forts. After her father takes a job abroad, eleven year old Vivian is sent from Dublin to stay with her grandparents…

Tracy Fahey is the author of 'Looking for Wildgoose Lodge', one of the short stories in our Impossible Spaces anthology.

Hello, visitors to the Hic Dragones blog, and welcome to the strange places and odder inhabitants you will find here. I’m Tracy Fahey, and I’m privileged to be one of the writers featured in the latest Hic Dragones publication, Impossible Spaces (July 2013), edited by the tireless Hannah Kate.  

However, I have a confession. I’m an imposter from another realm; my ‘other’ self is an academic, writing about the Gothic sites and stories from a critical perspective, while my dark side, the story-spinner, the weaver of happenings, happily cooks up the raw material for analysis. Both sides of me are fascinated with liminal areas, transgressed boundaries and spaces of otherness that we fill with associations, memories and the long echoes of folk practices. You can read more about my musings on doubles in creative and critical practice on The Gothic Imagination blog, hosted by University of Stirling.

My inspiration stems from my own endless fascination with tales, my childhood filled with the magic of my grandmother’s folk stories about local Gothic events. Like a deep font, I return to this again, and again, not only in creating stories or writing critically about folklore and Gothic, but in making art. I also run an art collective, Gothicise, who create site-specific work that revolves around sites and stories. These are public, participative events and happenings that feature recurring acts of storytelling, walking, acting and re-enacting.

Running between all my weird, parallel worlds is a recurring obsession with the unheimlich or uncanny home, the places and situations where we should feel at home, but rarely do. Being Irish, I’m preoccupied by the problematic notion of the home in national terms; this legendary centre of warmth, community and storytelling is also historically constituted as threatened, colonised and dispossessed. ‘Wildgoose Lodge’ which appears in Impossible Spaces is part of a growing collection of different tales I am amassing that relate to this idea of the uncanny home and all that may or may not happen within this mental and physical space, stories that deal with exile, loss, folk customs, ghost estates, weird suburbs and inexplicable noises in the night.  

I invite you to open the covers of Impossible Spaces, to slide from mainstream to slipstream, to step into these strange spaces that my fellow writers have created.  

What Speculative Fiction Taught Tracy Fahey         

About the Author

Tracy Fahey loves to write about all things Gothic. She writes tales about memory, loss, the uncanny and otherness.   You can read her latest story, ‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’ in the anthology Impossible Spaces’(July 2013), edited by the redoubtable Hannah Kate of Hic Dragones and available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Impossible-Spaces-Hannah-Kate/dp/0957029284.  Tracy has delivered papers at national and international conferences on Irish Gothic, dark domestic space, ghost estates, castles, folklore, werewolves, the monstrous and fairy tales.  She is creative director of an art collective, Gothicise (www.gothicise.weebly.com) based in Limerick, where she also runs the Department of Fine Art in the Limerick School of Art and Design.  In her spare time, what little of it remains, she is working on a PhD on the intersections between Irish Gothic and folklore .

What I’ve Learned From Speculative Fiction

I could write an epic on all that speculative fiction has taught me.  From my earliest encounters with local folktales and the Brothers Grimm my tastes have been shaped by strange spaces and whatever dwells within them.  Fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and most of all, tales of the supernatural continue to haunt and enchant me in equal measure.

Guest Post: Tracy Fahey

August 14, 2013

Time for me to invite another writer to come and talk about their work. Following on from Douglas Thompson’s guest post last month, I’m pleased to invite another writer on the Impossible Spaces blog tour onto the site. Today it’s the turn of Tracy Fahey.

I first met Tracy at a conference on monsters and monstrosity that I organized in Manchester in 2012. At that event, she presented some of her academic work which (broadly speaking) falls under the category of ‘Gothic Studies’. I found Tracy’s paper at the conference to be really well-researched and engaging, and so was happy (though surprised – as I had no idea she wrote creatively as well) to see her submit a short story for an anthology I was editing.

Tracy’s story in Impossible Spaces is entitled ‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’, and it is a story about the past, about the way we tell stories, and about the way we listen to them and let them shape us. It is a haunting – yet beautiful – piece, and I’m very pleased to have been able to include it in the book. Someone asked Tracy at the launch party why her story was the last one in the collection – if I may, I would like to answer that: I chose ‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’ as the finale for Impossible Spaces because it is, at its heart, a story about endings. But it is a story about how an ending just makes us think about all that has come before, all that has led us to that point. Also, the last two sentences gave me goosebumps that didn’t go away for hours, and that seemed a pretty cool way to leave our readers.