A debut collection of dark, fantasy short stories from Eoin Leydon O'Connor. In this collection, animals on a local farm drop dead without warning, with no apparent cause.
Two new lovers open up to each other about their insecurities, resulting in a surreal discovery.
A newly-wed young man discovers his husband harbours a dark supernatural secret that he's been keeping from him for the last ten years.
A Home Help arrives one morning to discover a client has been murdered and left especially for her to find.
...And more
A debut collection of dark, fantasy short stories from Eoin Leydon O'Connor. In this collection, animals on a local farm drop dead without warning, with no apparent cause.
Two new lovers open up to each other about their insecurities, resulting in a surreal discovery.
A newly-wed young man discovers his husband harbours a dark supernatural secret that he's been keeping from him for the last ten years.
A Home Help arrives one morning to discover a client has been murdered and left especially for her to find.
...And more
The livestock began dying in late October. Here on our farm, in the west, we were never ready for such a thing. Oh, sure, we’d had animals die before. Sheep, pigs, cows, the occasional hen snatched by the fox, that sort of thing, but nothing ever like this. My childhood had been filled with grunting pigs, noisy sheep, my father bringing me out to show me how to milk the cows and teaching me to be extremely careful around the hazardous machinery. My uncle Tomas had lost seven of his fingers learning that the hard way, and two of my cousins died in a slurry pit. Despite all the joyous times I’d had, holding the spring lambs, scratching the newly born piglets and grooming the horses when they’d arrived, Dad never let me forget about the dangers that we encountered every day. And most importantly, that I should never get too attached to the animals, or name them, because it would upset me when we had to sell or kill them in the end.
Over the years, through childhood and into adolescence, I’d cried when we sold the piglets, or when Dad had to put the runt down because the sow couldn’t feed it, or when we had to have one of our horses put down after they’d broken a leg. Once, I’d seen a murder of crows attack one of our spring lambs in the field next to our house and ran out to chase them away, crouching to steady the stumbling animal only to discover that the birds had pecked its eyes out. And after all of this, I’d assumed that I’d seen everything there was to see. That nothing on the farm could ever upset or frighten me ever again.
I was wrong.
I went out that morning as usual to feed the animals expecting to hear them bleating or squeal as I approached the barn, but when I pushed open the door to go inside, I was met by complete and utter silence. I knew immediately that something was wrong. The horses usually have their heads over their pen gate, ready for me to pet them, but instead I found them lying on their sides, glassy-eyed and stiff. The pigs the same, clumped together like they were sleeping, their eyes closed, their ears tucked down. The sheep in the pen next to them were like a large piece of fluff, lying on top of each other, a leg here and there, sticking out of the mass of white. Terrified by the sight, and not knowing what to do, I ran back towards the house.
Dad didn’t know whether to yell or cry or just sit down and let it hit him. He checked every single one of the animals to make sure they were dead, then he called the vet. When you live in a small village everyone knows each other, whether you like it or not. Word would soon get out about the dead animals and questions would be asked. What do you think happened? You think he killed them? Was he careless in his practice? Did he poison them?
According to the vet, Rory – a local man and a family friend for years - it wasn’t poison. Or anything they had eaten. It wasn’t heart attacks or health related issues. In fact, Rory couldn’t find anything whatsoever wrong with the animals other than that they were dead. Mum asked me to boil the kettle for tea for Rory, but I hovered outside the dining room door, listening to what he was telling them.
‘You’re certain you found nothing wrong with them?’ Dad asked.
‘I’m positive Frank. I’ve checked every single one of them. They were all healthy as a horse. No trace of anything in their systems, no signs of diseases or organ failure, no signs of electrocution. It was like they just … dropped dead suddenly.’
‘Animals don’t all just ‘drop dead’ Rory. You know that as well as I do. Probably better. I’d be more inclined to believe you if it was just one of my sheep or pigs, but this is every animal in my farmyard wiped out. How am I supposed to explain this to the Department inspector?’
‘At least there’s nothing to suggest foul play.’ Rory said.
Dad sighed loudly. ‘I don’t know. Fuck.’
Rory was right, we could take comfort at least that there was nothing malicious in these deaths and nothing to incriminate Dad.
We wouldn’t be the only ones to have his livestock wiped out. Mr McGuinness, one of my old teachers from school, reared turkeys in his front garden that he sold at Christmas every year for a reasonable price. Sometimes Dad would buy one, but not this year. One Monday morning, before going to work, Mr McGuinness went outside to find feathers swirling in the wind around his front garden and in the coop where he kept the birds. All of them were dead. And just like the animals on our farm, Rory couldn’t find a thing wrong with them.
This is when the panic began to set in across the village and people began bringing their pets to the vets to have them checked. Dogs, cats, parrots and hamsters, rats, mice. Not that Rory minded, he was getting a lot of business out of it. And people were genuinely scared. I would be too, if I had any animals left alive to bring to the vet.
After the deaths on our farm and the incident with Mr McGuinness’s turkeys, things seemed to calm down for a while. Dad got a new shipment of animals, which were scheduled to arrive the following week. The farm had to be inspected and meet the requirements for Dad to properly keep the animals. Fortunately for him, we passed with flying colours. Mum and I drove the green truck into town about two miles away to get bags of feed for the new arrivals. Queuing up at the checkout with the shopping trolley full, I could feel everyone around staring at us when they thought I wasn’t looking. And honestly, I didn’t blame them. They probably had their suspicions. I felt a little better that Mr McGuinness’s turkeys had died because at least we weren’t the only ones it had happened to.
On the way back home, I sat in the front passenger seat beside Mum while she drove silently with the radio playing. As we drove across the bridge, we paused behind a red jeep that had stopped at the traffic lights. I gazed out the window at the river, leaning my temple against the glass and closing my eyes, listening to the rumble of the engine.
Something smacked against the windscreen of the truck, making Mum scream. A seagull, with speckled feathers, had dropped onto the glass, creating a jagged crack, its head twisted ninety degrees, eyes open and staring in at us, its feathers blowing in the wind, several blowing away while its neck bled down onto the bonnet of the truck.
Our vehicle wasn’t the only one hit. The red jeep in front of us honked its horn loudly, the driver’s door opening and a woman exiting quickly, hands up to her face, crying and screaming. Something fell onto her head then, making her collapse and thrash around. A dead crow. A dull thump hit our roof and a parked car suddenly blared to life as a fallen bird set its alarm off. On the pavement and tarmac, crows, seagulls, jackdaws, sparrows and a hawk collapsed, some on their back with their talons in the air. Mum told me to stay in the truck while she got out to look up at the sky, but I was too curious, and too full of fear to sit still. Up in the heavens, through the clouds and out of the sunlight, like small bombs, the birds fell, already dead by the time they’d hit the ground all around us. One of the seagulls splattered against the bonnet of the car next to us, flicking me with blood. In front of me, all through the queue of traffic leading up to the lights and beyond, littering the road, were the corpses of birds, with more falling across the roofs of the town like rain in the distance.
It didn’t stop there. Rory was inundated with calls from people in hysterics over their pets that had died in the middle of the day. One of Mum’s friend’s, Allison, returned home from work and opened the back door to call her dog Otto, only to find him lying against the fence at the back of the garden, his tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth.
Other instances of people going into town to the kennels to retrieve their dogs and finding them dead too. Later I found a stray cat under a bush covered with flies and bluebottles, buzzing loudly and crawling across its face and eyes, in and out of its open mouth, nestling in its dishevelled fur.
And then there was the first human death. Mr McCarthy, an elderly man, dropped dead in the shopping centre. I went to school with his grandson, Michael. As you can imagine, panic ensued, worse than before. That it had only been animals so far and not people provided some kind of safe barrier between us and them. This incident contradicted that assumption. According to his family, however, Mr McCarthy had a history of heart disease. That seemed to restore some normality. But the suspicion was still there, brewing amongst everyone.
It hasn’t gotten any worse since then.
And now it’s just us at home, surrounded by empty sheds and fields, the wind whispering through the trees and bushes. The lack of bird song, the absence of sheep bleating, animal grunting and neighing, the death of any sounds of life on the farm, makes it worse. Dad is in a state, waiting for the new horses to arrive tomorrow. I think he’s scared that when they arrive, they’ll drop dead too. And honestly, I don’t blame him. It’s in everyone’s mind. On the nine o’clock news last night there were reporters standing in front of our post office, talking about how the Department of Agriculture inspectors were coming here to investigate all the incidents over the past week to try and determine the cause of it all. There is talk of the village being quarantined at some point but quarantined for what exactly, they don’t know.
I get up and go into the kitchen from my room to see Dad asleep in his armchair in the sitting room, Mum gently laying a blanket over his legs, careful so as not to wake him. She catches my eye as she turns around and puts a finger to her lips, closing the door and coming out to hug me.
‘Is he okay?’ I whisper.
‘He’s just tired. He hasn’t slept since last week. He pretends to be asleep so I won’t annoy him. I’ve tried getting him to take something to help him nod off, but he insists he’s fine.’
‘What are we going to do with the new horses?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, Ciaran. I suppose we’ll put them in the barn for the night. Wait and see what happens.’ She shifts uneasily as she says this, dusting off her apron and going over to the sink to wash the vegetables for dinner. I go out the back door and down the porch steps, crossing the garden around the side of the house towards the field. Looking up, I see the empty sky with white clouds blowing over my head. Beyond the wall, in the field directly in front of me, is the wilting yellow grass, short this time of year. Silence presses in on all sides, and dotted across the entire field, are a murder of crows, every last one of them dead.
Rural Tales is a collection of eight short stories by the Irish author, Eoin Leydon O'Connor.
With titles including, "Dying Breeds", "Devilishly", "The Bloodless and Marie" and "Bullets", it comes as no surprise that O'Connor's collection of stories centre around themes of horror, fantasy and the human relationships that surround it. For example, in "Glass Teeth", the reader is introduced to a budding relationship, one which hides a sinister twist beneath the beaming smiles, or in "All I Have for you in Contempt", where the unnamed narrator stews in a bitter mix of envy and joy as they recount a figure, presumably adopted into the family, who has passed away. Each self-contained story lasts about seven pages in length and is written in differing perspectives, such as those written in first and third person. Fitting the nature of the stories and the horror genre, the tone of voice is generally dark in nature.
Although written well in terms of the technical ability, the stories feel somewhat lacking but lacking in a way that is hard to place. In some stories, the setup feels rushed in order to get to the reader to the crux of the conflict and in others too much time lingers on details that do not add much to the story. If anything, a lot of these stories could have been serviced better as novellas (stories of up to 40,000 words) in their own right. There are also a few instances of very long paragraphs which last between a third and half a page. When these are deployed back-to-back it can make it hard to maintain reader engagement, especially when more often than not, they probably could have been edited or grammatically broken down into multiple paragraphs.
As a collection of short stories intended to cause shock and surprise, Rural Tales is a good debut for O'Connor, but the writing lacks the needed gut punches that readers expect in the horror genre. Despite coming into this book with an open mind, the end result feels a bit lacklustre. All this may be due to personal perspective, but I am hopefully it is something that, with the right critic group, will be addressed in subsequent publications.
AEB Reviews