McCormack, Mike
Entry updated 6 November 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1965- ) UK-born author, in Ireland from childhood, active from the mid 1990s. Some short stories stretch past the mundane, but very little of his work extends into the fantastic until Notes from a Coma (2005). It is a Near Future Dystopian excursus on the nature of Crime and Punishment whose protagonist, locked into a coma as an involuntary participant in the "Somnos Project", unstoppably iterates his thoughts and confessions through a bricolage-ridden Internet text. The cumulative effect is intense. Solar Bones (2016), told in one fantasticatedly grammatical sentence, records the afterlife confession of an Irish civil engineer who had been implicated in the early twenty-first century economic "miracle" that almost bankrupted Ireland. He speaks to us throughout All Hallow's Night, or Halloween: when the dead may do so. Solar Bones was given the International Dublin literary award in 2018. [JC]
Mike McCormack
born London: 1965
works (highly selected)
- Notes from a Coma (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) [hb/]
- Solar Bones (Dublin, Ireland: Tramp Press, 2016) [hb/Fiachra McCarthy]
- The Plague of Souls (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 2023) [hb/]
links
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