Jordan, Neil
Entry updated 16 March 2026. Tagged: Author, Film.
(1950- ) Irish screenwriter, film director and author, active from the mid-1970s; over a full and complex career, his engagement with Fantastika, whether expressed in written or filmed forms, has been intermittent, but not offhand. Early work, like the stories assembled as Nights in Tunisia (coll 1976), tends to focus on examinations of individual personalities in extremis, often in Ireland. Novels with some elements of the fantastic include Dream of a Beast (1983), the surreal transfiguration of whose protagonist into a jungle-like Monster conflates a crisis of Identity and Climate Change; Sunrise with Sea Monster (1995), whose eponymous Monster makes its appearance in the climax; Mistaken (2011), set in the 1960s with Doppelganger elements supplied by something like the ghost of Bram Stoker. The later Carnivalesque (2017) is a full-fledged fantasy, whose young protagonist Dany is entrapped in a funhouse mirror while a Doppelganger replaces him at home; Dany's partial escape and immersion in the fabular "real" life behind the scenes of the carnival climaxes in his intensifying engagement with "carnies", who are in fact supernatural creatures, emissaries from Faerie; some of the same romantic immersion with Faerie shapes The Well of Saint Nobody (2023), which is set in Ireland, where a wounded pianist is healed by his lover by Magic moss, as the plot thickens around them.
Jordan's career as director has been interwoven with his written work, either directly or tonally, though it is convenient to separate its description, as here. His first film, Angel (1982; vt Danny Boy 1982), shares some of the intensity – which has been described as spiritual – of the early fiction; The Company of Wolves (1984) is adapted from Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" (in Bananas, anth 1977, ed Emma Tennant). Another relatively early film, Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on Anne Rice's Vampire novel, is more commercially focused; the later vampire film Byzantium (2012), based on a play by Moira Buffini, intensifies the filmic "expressiveness" typical of the Gothic vampire movie into gonzo extravagances. Ondine (2009) hints at the supernatural with perhaps a touch of Irishry. Greta (2018) submerges its kidnapped and/or molested cast in coils of a female serial killer and stalker, with a shark=jumping melodramatic intensity that seems hauntedly more than natural.
Of most direct sf interest is a late tale, The Library of Traumatic Memory (2026), set in the distant Near Future of 2084 Ireland, whose protagonist, a researcher at the eponymous Library, uses its advanced retrieval Technology to reconstruct a version of a dead lover capable of conversing with him, reminiscentially. Parallel experiences a few centuries earlier may have been enabled – and their connection to 2084 instantiated – by John Dee's scrying glass. In its erotic focus, its use of Ireland, and its sometimes scattershot manipulation of nonmimetic story conventions, the tale may seem to gather much of Jordan's career into one bundle. [JC]
Neil Patrick Jordan
born Sligo, Ireland: 25 February 1950
works (selected)
- The Dream of a Beast (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983) [hb/]
- Sunrise with Sea Monster (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995) [hb/]
- Nightlines (New York: Random House, 1995) [vt of the above: hb/]
- Shade (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004) [hb/Adam Fuss]
- Mistaken (London: John Murray, 2011) [hb/]
- Carnivalesque (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2017) [hb/]
- The Well of Saint Nobody (London: Head of Zeus, 2023) [hb/]
- The Library of Traumatic Memory (London: Head of Zeus, 2026) [hb/]
links
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