Ruth Gilligan is a writer and academic from Dublin now based in the UK. She has published five books to date and was the youngest person ever to top the Irish Bestsellers’ List.Her most recent novel, The Butchers, is set in 1996 during the BSE crisis and was published in March 2020.
At the Guardian, Gilligan tagged ten “Irish gothic” offerings from which she drew eerie inspiration for The Butchers, including:
Himself by Jess Kidd (2016)Read about another entry on the list.
If all this talk of repressed suffering and hidden wounds is sounding a bit grim, Kidd’s debut manages to be both gothic and great craic. Having grown up in a priest-ridden orphanage, handsome devil Mahony now returns to the small Mayo town of his birth to investigate his mother’s untimely death. The cast of local misfits he encounters are a hoot, as are their predecessors, for Kidd brings to (half) life the town’s quirky legions of ghosts; Mahony charms them all, the living and the dead.
--Marshal Zeringue
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