[A] heartbreaker of a debut novel ... It could be argued that the heart and soul of Irish character, were one to venture into generalities, stem from a sensitivity to light. Certainly, the characters in this novel see very little sun, both metaphorically and practically ... Nicky—and her quest—is the soul of this fine novel ... In Colin Barrett’s nimble hands...the lives of a small collective of mournful souls become vibrant before us, and their yearning is depicted with wistfulness, no small amount of humor and one dangerously ill-tempered goat.
Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face ... The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality ... Barrett cleverly constructs his novel ... Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life — even touches of humor — may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.
He explores the blackly comic potential of criminal behaviour: the eccentric etiquette of gangsters, the fine line between the bizarre and the banal, the way humour can give way to horror ... The novel has a tender heart, almost too tender in the middle section when the simmering energy turns a little mushy ... What stops the book from slipping into sentimentality is a wide cast of brilliantly sketched characters ... Thrillingly moreish.
On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch ... With Barrett it is all precision and precious little release. His is the type of brilliance that can occasionally veer into the territory of the virtuosic, the relentless and the clinical. When working in the short-story form, this is an unalloyed asset, but across the course of a whole novel, it can begin to feel a little airless ... What ultimately prevents this from dragging the novel down is Barrett’s handling of dialogue, which is so consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison.
I would say I was unable to put Wild Houses down, but I was constantly putting it down, to make a note of a new word or felicitous phrase ... Colin Barrett’s short stories can sometimes be too heavy on the show-stopping detail. Here he keeps his descriptive powers on a shorter leash; when he does let fly, it connects.
Delicate and beautiful ... The crime-caper plot is really just a framework, but Barrett engineers it carefully ... You could do worse than quote some of Barrett’s small miracles of precision, some of them taking the form of a single word ... A sheer joy to read.
A novel such as Wild Houses realises life in full and without pity ... A palpable sense of human eccentricity, and endurance, is always there, just beneath the surface. The surface is often less than pretty.
Places a standard kidnap story in an interesting setting with engaging characters ... Wild Houses characters’ interactions and motivations are presented in granular detail, often in evocative language, with colloquial dialogue serving as an effective vehicle for transmitting backstory ... Between the plot points, though, Barrett layers in many conversations and other extended scenes that are interesting but often tangential, failing to move the core narrative along. These passages are elaborated with expertise, but there is an absence of narrative pulse, especially important in a kidnap tale, as well as the depth and complexity that would have been provided by a subplot.
His prose is a delight from the first page ... He is less interested in concocting elaborate twists than in crafting fluent prose, pitch-perfect dialogue and capturing the comedy and poignancy of life in and around small towns ... Engrossing.
Feels uncomfortably familiar in its complexity and matter-of-fact ruthlessness ... Quite an achievement, a novel of crisp sentences and understated language that propel a gripping, cinematic narrative ... Barrett resists redemption, and in so doing, gestures towards a more complicated world, one more fitting for our present geopolitical moment, in which we all seem to perch breathlessly on the edge of change in all its frightening possibility.
A brisk, engaging tale of a small group of dubious characters who'd be at home in one of Martin McDonagh's darkly comic films ... Barrett moves his plot efficiently between the story of Doll's captivity and Nicky's uneasy mind in what feels to her like an interminable weekend. There's pure pleasure in reading Barrett's crisp prose.
