In a flip-over, reverse-read format, Pat McCabe's double novella consists of yarns interlocked by stylistic staples including Panama hats, Coleridge lines, sinister dolls and voices from beyond the grave. It is a black world pivoted on resurrected hurts and secrets that damaged characters try to conceal or suppress. Hello Mr Bones is a gleeful account of apparent revenge, its narrator's tone being a malicious shade of twee as he toys with a couple in London who mistakenly believe they have found happiness.
Goodbye Mr Rat is the meatier of McCabe's twin-track cold cuts. Narrated by the ashes of an IRA member being returned to his birthplace in an urn by his Amish-playwright lover, it hops between a US road trip and the Northern Ireland of the Troubles and afterwards. The horrors of sectarian violence intersect with communal memory and betrayal of informers; one description grasps a hunger striker's hand as "a white bony claw about the size of a bird's talon". This is a dark yet comic double elpee filled with psychopaths and their doomed prey.
