Patrick McCabe likes to employ disembodied narrators. His last book, The Stray Sod Country, was told by the Devil himself, bent on causing disruption in a small Irish town. McCabe uses the same technique in both parts of this odd book, which is actually a pair of novellas, ‘Hello Mr Bones’ and ‘Goodbye Mr Rat’. Whereas the Devil could have been read as a means of expressing the externalisation of long-held tensions, here the narrators’ motivations and purposes are much more elusive.

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