The Servants: And Other Strange Stories

by John O'Donoghue

The Servants and Other Strange Stories includes an Irish short story that never ends, a ghost story set in Keats’ House, an encounter between ‘the little people’ and an Irish midlands town. The collection also contains three novellas featuring a woman caught up in the Irish Famine, a private eye who discovers a secret Dublin police unit, and a man who is shipwrecked on an abandoned island off the West Coast of Ireland only to find it’s not so abandoned after all.

At the heart of the collection is ‘The Servants’, which tells the story of Seamus, a robot who has a vocation to the priesthood. Set in an Irish version of Asimov’s robot universe, the novella pays homage to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Flann O’Brien’s De Selby.

Ranging from mystery stories to science fiction, The Servants and Other Strange Stories is Irish story telling at its best.

‘The Irish Short Story That Never Ends’, ‘Bitter Chill’, ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, ‘Refugees’, ‘The Spot in His Eye’, ‘Letters from a Famine’, ‘The Heart’s Needle’, ‘The Servants’, ‘The Islanders’, ‘Acknowledgements’.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

John O'Donoghue is the author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray 2009) and the poetry collecions Letter To Lord Rochester (Waterloo Press, 2004); The Beach Generation (Pighog Press, 2007); and Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press, 2009).

Sectioned: A Life Interrupted was awarded Mind Book Of The Year 2010.

John lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.

Reviews

[Nancy Oakes]

coming soon -- wow.

[Mario Guslandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

That’s my first encounter with this author, whose stories are hard to be clearly defined. I’m impressed with the title story “ The Servants” ,actually an offbeat ,fascinating novella exploring the consequences of priests being substituted by perfect robots ( or “androids” if you prefer), gradually taking the place of normal humang beings. A perfect mix of horror and SF.
Among the other stories I’ve enjoyed “ The Spot in thr Eye” retelling the story of a local murder and the mystery hidden behind it and “ The Heart’s Needle”, a mix of crime and fantasy featuring a former policeman,now a private eye, discovering the existence of a secret police outfit while investigating some strange events taking place in Dublin.