The Mountain’s Dark Wonders – Patrick McCabe (novelist/playwright)

There are few treasures of the tribe which can be said to compare with this extraordinary document, enhanced significantly by the magical manner of its discovery. From the sky, it would appear, dropped, high above a border. But for the fact that when it lands, we find it in a place where there is in existence no such spurious, drearily empirical demarcation.

Seán McElwain here delivers nothing short of a golden fleece – a magic box uncovered in a miracle mountain cavern. So cared-for and painstakingly curated that it evokes the response, in another context, of the commentator Andre Jolles: ‘The miraculous is the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.’

Upon approaching, for the first time, this extraordinary collection, let potential readers and listeners be assured of this: that beyond Sliabh Beagh, the lights have already been lit in the windows of the house – and in the deep dark forest inquiring questers can confidently begin to move. With eyes open, listening, trying to find their bearings. Because find them they will; in the company of Messrs. Murray and James Whiteside. Don’t let me delay you – step ahead and vanish, into this world of absolute wonder.