Fredrick Mulligan, Life in Flames
Bald and toothless apparently from early manhood, Limerick-born Fredrick Mulligan was hardly the most handsome of Irish writers, but he did manage to invent (and exhaust) a new fictional genre, the so-called Paddy-slasher. His influences were mostly non-literary — indeed, in his only traceable interview (which he gave to a short-lived magazine named Tuning Fork), he claimed never to read at all. ‘Books are a quare thing,’ he said. ‘A French fad, surely. I only got into writing because any fucker can do it. All you need is a pencil.’ Mulligan drew inspiration from the ‘video-nasties’ of the early eighties, and such directors as Dario Argento, Abel Ferrara, George A. Romero, and especially Ruggero Deodato (of Cannibal Holocaust notoriety).
Mulligan left Limerick at nineteen and spent the subsequent decade in London, working on the sites, drinking copiously, and having affairs with anyone who came into his purview that would look past his formidable ugliness. ‘Women, men — never gave a bollox,’ he later explained. For three years he shared a house in Kilburn with five or six other young Irishmen. Then he moved into a basement bedsit north of Kentish Town. It was in that cramped bedsit, by lamplight after hard days on the sites, or hungover at weekends, that Mulligan wrote his collection of short stories, Hounds of Hell and the Rum-Beast of Kilmacud, and his only published novel, Slaughterchaun. The stories and novel read like transcripts of early first-person-shooter video games such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3D (games which Mulligan never lived to see, but doubtless would have approved of). In Slaughterchaun, narrative thrust is eschewed in favour of unrelenting carnage, gunplay and mutilation. Jack, a muscular and sexually omnivorous Limerick farmer, blasts his way across a ravaged Ireland swarming with vicious and depraved faery-folk. Armed with a shotgun, a blowtorch and a haversack full of rudimentary explosives, Jack joins forces with Priest, a clergyman who has lost his faith after seeing his congregation decimated by the faery horde, their innards gorged upon and their corpses incinerated. ‘God has left us?’ roars the priest into a gully at one point. ‘Very well, then I am the Black Christ of Annihilation!’
Dialogue is wooden and preposterous; characterisation non-existent. The climactic chapter, ‘Mound of Corpses’, has a body count in the hundreds, as wave upon wave of winged banshees, leprechauns and faeries descend from the blood-red skies upon our beleaguered heroes, who are now inexplicably perched on the summit of Carrantuohill. After hours of blasting, Priest turns the shotgun on himself, blowing out the tip of his spine after reiterating his contempt for God, church and man. Jack flees to a cave to re-gather his strength and draw up plans for a new resistance. The novel ends with a fevered prayer to the blackest gods of hate and vengeance.
Mulligan evidently intended a sequel. Slaughterchaun, alas, was to be the last book he ever completed. Aged thirty-one and jaded with London life, he returned to Limerick. He lived in a caravan in the countryside several miles outside the city, where he bathed every morning in a river, drank cheap flagons of cider, and made several attempts at a new novel, provisionally titled Banshee Inferno.
The words, however, would not come. Three nights before his thirty-third birthday, Mulligan wrote a few half-coherent lines on a page torn from a gay porn magazine, and pinned it to a nearby tree. Then he drank a bottle of whiskey, doused his caravan in petrol, lay on his bed wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, and incinerated himself.
Banned on first appearance, Mulligan’s books have never been published in Ireland to this day.
Martin Knows Me — the Lonely Struggleof David Haynes
Failure can be a kind of career. Bitterness too. Unlike most young Irishmen who emigrated to London in the eighties, David Haynes went not in flight from a barren economy (he left behind steady work as a reporter at the Derry Star, where he had covered the arts, sports and agriculture), but as a literary pilgrim. Enamoured of contemporary English writing, Haynes’s most ardent devotion was reserved for Martin Amis, whose career and personal life he followed avidly. Harbouring dreams of becoming a fiction writer himself, Haynes believed that London would provide a more amenable backdrop for such a project than his troubled native city.
Living alone in an apartment off the Charing Cross Road overlooking Soho, Haynes spent many evenings during his first years in London rereading all the Amis novels that had then been published. Determined to grasp the sorcery of the master’s style, he would type out the novels in their entirety on the typewriter he used for his journalism. By day, when he wasn’t writing articles or chasing down sources, he would walk the streets, alleys and inner-city parks evoked in Amis’s feverish fictional universe.
After three years in London, Haynes lost his job at the Irish Post, where he had written on various issues of interest to the London Irish community. Taking a job as a waiter at Berconi’s, an Italian restaurant in Soho, he decided that the interruption to his journalistic work was an opportunity to focus on his literary ambitions, which until then had remained largely nominal.
The novel that resulted from this decision, Martin Knows Me, was rejected in its early drafts by nineteen publishers in the UK and eight in Ireland. A smattering of phrases amid the rejection letters, suggesting mild interest in Haynes’s future output, sufficed to keep his determination alive: he kept on writing. Working each night at the restaurant until two or three, Haynes would return to his flat, fix a cafetière, and write for five or six hours. Then he would read a little, and sleep until it was time for the evening shift.
Though he made several attempts to move on from Martin Knows Me, Haynes’s unpublished first novel continued to tug at him. He believed in the book, or at least in its potential — to abandon it would be traumatic. In the earlier drafts, Martin Amis had appeared as a distant, ambiguous figure, haunting the thoughts of the sensitive and ambitious narrator (also named Martin), as he came of age against an oppressive backdrop of sectarianism and narrow-mindedness: Amis was an emblem of the young man’s yearning, disaffection and thirst for culture (or merely glamour). In later drafts, the novel’s tone is considerably darker: the plot now involves a troubled writer who moves to England seemingly with the intention of becoming Martin Amis, or possibly murdering or sleeping with him. Though these later drafts contained, in the words of a young female intern at a literary agency to which Haynes submitted the typescript, ‘some uncomfortable insights’ and ‘moments of real skill’, they failed to attract much attention.
Seven years had passed. David Haynes was still in London, still waiting tables, still unpublished. He was now in his mid-thirties, no longer a young man, and with little to show for it. Over the course of a harsh winter, the truth, buried for so long beneath the furies of work and the late-night chatter of his typewriter, pushed itself to the surface: Haynes could not write. At least, he could not write like Martin Amis. The revelation was the trigger for a prolonged psychic unravelling. More than once, Haynes found himself weeping helplessly while standing in the kitchen at Berconi’s, embarrassing nearby chefs. In his apartment he would sit for hours by the window, gazing into the darkness till a dreary sunrise filled out the cobbled sleaze of Soho. During this period, Martin Amis was at the summit of his powers and acclaim, before the dethroning he was to undergo in the nineties. Haynes could no longer bear to read anything by or about Amis — too lacerating were the reminders of the glamorous life and mercurial talent, the precision and swiftness of intellect which would never be his.