The faces were disfigured: all sores, terrible teeth and mouths, and they were all biting, like biting towards me. It was like a vision from hell, worse than anything you could ever dream about, and the stench coming from them was terrible. They just rose up out of the ground, staring at me, trying to attack me but they couldn't because they had no bodies that I could see. Just the heads. I'll never forget them. I thought I was going to die at that moment. I was calling out to my wife and Jim and Margaret. The heads were shrieking. It was as if they were waiting for Sherrin to kill me. Like I was some sort of offering that he was making to them. An innocent housewife, a callow young curate, a curious schoolboy, an amiable pensioner, and others like them. Ordinary people, leading ordinary lives in present-day Ireland. Until unwittingly each opened a door into the unknown, and allowed strange forces to enter their lives. Through their shocking, true stories, The Dark Sacrament charts the terrifying struggle against the preternatural, battles that only ended with the intervention of that most valiant of churchmen the exorcist.

The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland

Christina McKenna

David M. Kiely

Biographies & Memoirs

GILL MACMILLAN

The Godforsaken Daughter

When Ruby Clare's father was alive, they toiled together happily on their dairy farm in Northern Ireland. Since his death, Ruby—thirty-three, plump but comely—has been forced indoors and made a domestic drudge for Martha, her endlessly critical mother, and her prettier younger sisters, May and June. But everything changes when Ruby finds her late grandmother's old case in the attic. Among its strange contents: a curious, handmade volume called The Book of Light. As Ruby delves into its mysterious pages, she's enticed into a most beguiling world, whose allure and magnetic power she finds irresistible. Martha, convinced that her newly empowered daughter is going crazy, enlists the help of the kindly parish priest, and then psychiatrist Henry Shevlin. Henry appears imperturbable, yet is inwardly reeling from his wife's unexplained disappearance the previous year. As Ruby undergoes therapy, she meets local bachelor farmer Jamie McCloone. Through their shared loneliness and isolation the two find the courage to connect. But will Ruby's mother allow her daughter the happiness she so richly deserves? The Godforsaken Daughter is an unforgettable peek into small-town life in Ireland's recent past. It's a glorious successor to McKenna's first two “Tailorstown” novels, The Misremembered Man and The Disenchanted Widow.

Godforsaken Daughter, The

Literature & Fiction

Literary

BRILLIANCE AUDIO ^

It’s the summer of 1981. Newly widowed Bessie Halstone is fleeing Belfast with her young son, Herkie. She’s wrongly suspected of pocketing £10,000, the loot from a heist carried out by Packie, her late (and unmourned) husband.   Bessie has plans. She longs to make a fresh start. But first she must reach the safety of her sister’s home, in County Sligo, to borrow money for the trip.  She doesn’t make it. Car trouble forces her to sojourn in Tailorstown, a sleepy rural community. Her plans are put on hold as she decides to lay low for a while.   She’ll need cash. She finds work as a housekeeper for the handsome but mysterious parish priest.  In the meantime, Lorcan Strong, an artist and a native of Tailorstown, is summoned home. With reluctance, he returns to the place where he feels almost a stranger, a town he has long outgrown.  A chance meeting with young Herkie Halstone leads Lorcan into the world of the disenchanted Bessie ― and into a grave danger that has pursued them both from   Belfast.  The Disenchanted Widow is an unforgettable peek into small-town life in Ireland’s recent past. It’s a glorious successor to McKenna’s first “Tailorstown” novel,  The Misremembered Man.

Disenchanted Widow, The

<p>"I learned about conflict from my parents." So begins Christina McKenna's haunting memoir of her lonely early life. Recounting scenes from her childhood in Ulster, she paints a memorable and poignant picture of violence and oppression with her brutal father and protective mother, whose retaliation to her husband's meanness came in the form of a secret yellow dress. Her formative years and her foray into the world, which begin with the daily trudge to and from school, are peopled by a troupe of bizarre and unforgettable characters dancing in and out of her life, filling her with awe and wonder. Among them are Miss McKeague, a gentle, calm and graceful religious zealot, Great Aunt Rose, the "Yankees," Norrie the transvestite and, in the wings, her stern, unyielding uncles, each vying for the ancestral money and land to the exclusion of everyone else. At age eleven, she experiences a frightening supernatural occurrence, a prolonged haunting that confirms for her the reality of the spirit world. Though it affects her deeply, she later learns to channel her confusion into twin artistic passions: poetry and painting. The discordant nature of Christina McKenna's young life, and the feelings of inferiority it bred, lead her to examine all the limiting belief systems she grew up with, and question the validity of the hidebound Catholicism of her childhood. This is a rite-of-passage account of two generations of Irish women, told with great humor and compassion. On the one hand is the writer; on the other the heroic mother who showed her love as best she could. McKenna concludes that our past, no matter how painful, need not keep us bound--once we choose love over hate. That choice, she suggests, will set us free.</p>

My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

Community & Culture

Neil Wilson Pub Ltd

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Books by Christina McKenna