You may not have heard of Phildy Hackball, but thanks to Patrick McCabe--and, we're told, to "an ingenue of an English publisher who had never been in Ireland before"--you're about to get your chance. Hackball is the putative author of Mondo Desperado, a collection of short stories that explore the underbelly of provincial Barntrosna. And what an underbelly it is! McCabe's mouthpiece delivers all the graphic details on Declan Coyningham, the holiest boy in town by far, who seems headed for a life in the church until the locals decide that his inflated prospects need further inflating (literally). Then there's Cora Bunyan, the narrator's wife, who's been enjoying one too many Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge. And let us not overlook a cameo by the actual Bruce Lee, who importunes Hackball to be his ghost writer. Some would have it that the kung fu maestro is just a waiter from the Red Lotus Temple restaurant in Mullingar, but the narrator is nonetheless determined to maintain the highest literary standards: I wish my story to be as near perfect as possible. To outline and candidly delineate not just the background to my years of friendship with Bruce Lee but that of the martial arts as we have come to know them--the heists, the head-busting she-wolves, the drug lords, the torn trousers, the pieces of other films that get stuck in by accident. And until I have that story told to my satisfaction, I see no point in concerning myself unduly as to whether I receive the occasional letter from a publisher or not. McCabe's follow-up to Breakfast on Pluto (which made the Booker Prize shortlist) confirms him as one of Ireland's most distinctive and inimitable voices. The stories in Mondo Desperado seem to emanate from some parallel universe, but with their diseased take on national stereotypes, they provide an incisive, viciously cruel commentary on some of Ireland's most sacred cows. And in the end, Phildy Hackball is a wonderfully naive drinking companion, forever leading us up the wrong alleyway. Each time you think you're safely at home, another satiric grenade goes off in your face. Read, laugh, and be afraid. --Alan Stewart

From Publishers Weekly
If you spliced Gualtiero Jacopetti's shockumentary Mondo films with the surreal clippings from the "Cruiskeen Lawn" newspaper column of Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O'Brien), the comic result might be this "serial novel" of short stories, shaggy dog tales and spoofs from the fictitious pen of McCabe's authorial desperado, Phildy Hackball, set in his crazy village of Barntrosna. Even stranger and campier than McCabe's recent Booker-shortlisted Breakfast on Pluto, these 10 intertwined stories mix loony subject matter culled from trashy paperbacks with Hibernian stereotypes and cliches. Like an Irish bull in a china shop, McCabe hilariously charges through yarns about genetically engineered winged donkeys ("The Valley of the Flying Jennets"), yokel farmers picked up in discotheques ("The Boils of Thomas Gully") and a pious schoolboy blown up not with a bomb but a tire pump ("The Bursted Priest"). The maniac citizens of Barntrosna somehow believe their wives are secret go-go dancers ("Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge"); the local Chinese takeaway is Bruce Lee's secret hangout ("My Friend Bruce Lee"); and the bishop's clerical protege was really Lucifer stirring up the swinging '60s ("I Ordained the Devil"). In a satire on McCabe's own career ("The Big Prize"), Barntrosna's unlikeliest novelist takes the mickey out of contemporary Irish writers and the award-lavishing British literary establishment. Only in the last, lengthy story, "The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," does this pulp fiction gag almost run aground, when Barntrosna's nicest student nurse goes to London, where she discovers lesbian love and drug racketeering before she is safely returned to the picturesque, demented town of McCabe's berserk imagination. 8-city author tour; 15-city NPR radio campaign. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
McCabe's latest (after Breakfast on Pluto, LJ 12/15/98) is the much-needed antidote to Angela's Ashes, which is riding yet another wave of popularity thanks to Alan Parker's movie. Americans like their Irish miserable, but McCabe's perverted, provincial Paddy's induce cackling and knee-slapping -not torrential tears. Instead of Limerick, the Booker Prize finalist has chosen fictitious Barntrosna as the setting for ten B-movie parables, imagined by local Phildy Hackball. A B-movie director himself, hackball exploits Catholicism and Irish quaintness in ways never thought possible-e.g., the Bishop of Barntrosna confesses to ordaining the Devil, and Noreen Tiernan, the golden-girl-next-door, goes to London for nursing school but becomes a black-leather-lovin' lesbian mugger. Cineastes beware: Hackball never neatly ties the ends of his narratives: he just screeches to a halt seconds before the bedget runs out. Unlike the Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, this "serial novel" doesn't contain McCabe's "serious," understated macabre, but that's just fine in tehse post-post-millennial times. Highly recommended for all public libraries.--Heather McCormack, "Library Journal"Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Dean Albarelli
Mondo Desperado is more or less unified by a singularly quirky sensibility.

From Booklist
McCabe's interconnected first-person testimonies from the people of the Irish town Barntrosna is rather like Under Milkwood. The milk is badly curdled, though. One eccentric after another (there seems to be no other kind of townsman) tells his tale. The Barntrosna bishop tortures himself unendingly with the hair shirt of having ordained the devil himself, Fr. Packie Coolie, his competitor within the church hierarchy. Pats Donaghy wins (he thinks) the coveted Buglass-McKenzie Literary Prize and takes his mother, who mistakes him for the pope, to the South Seas, where she sips mint juleps and arranges audiences with him for the most favored islanders. Larry Bunyon is convinced his prim, small-town-pretty wife, Cora, leads a secret life of drink, drugs, and other sins in that squalid pit of sexual depravity, the Go-Go Lounge. Walter Mitty-ish "Helmet-Head" McGeough's well-known adoration of martial arts master Bruce Lee spurs the crude, loutish townspeople to play him a cruel and nasty joke. Are these villagers funny? Maybe. Desperate? Beyond any doubt. Whitney Scott

Marie Claire
"Excellent...as manic and articulate as ever...Grotesque genius just about sums it up."

Telegraph on Sunday
"This weird and wonderful collection of distinctly Irish oddities gives a compelling insight...into one of the more excitingly eclectic and absurd minds working in contemporary fiction anywhere."


"Excellent...as manic and articulate as ever...Grotesque genius just about sums it up."

London Sunday Times
"Mondo Desperado takes us through the looking-glass into the skewed, self-contained comic universe of Barntrosna...The traditional iconography is subverted and realigned with inspired irreverence."

Book Description
Patrick McCabe has long been recognized as a writer of rare talent and unique voice, whose vision of the world is so distinctive that "McCabesque" has become an adjective with multiple meanings, including "exquisitely, beautifully, mad in the head!"He was a Booker Prize finalist for The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Aer Lingus/Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was made into a motion picture directed by Neil Jordan and cowritten by McCabe and Jordan. He was again a Booker Prize finalist for Breakfast on Pluto, which won the Spirit of Life Arts/Sunday Independent Irish Literature Award and was a number one international bestseller.McCabe has been described as "the lodestone of new Irish fiction" (Wall Street Journal), "a dark. genius of incongruity and the grotesque" (Sunday Observer) and "one of Ireland's finest living writers" (New York Times Book Review).The Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented on McCabe's "remarkable...ability to induce compassion for the unlikeliest people," and in Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel, that ability and the full range of his "grotesque genius" (Marie Claire) combine to produce a brilliant, macabre' dementedly funny and surreally imagined fiction of intertwined narratives set in a small Irish town. McCabe himself has described Mondo Desperado as being "like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio--on drugs."In his mondo tales of the insular town of Barntrosna, McCabe assembles a distinctly Irish crew of odd and unusual inhabitants who live on and regularly cross, often unconsciously, the border between fantasy and reality. In "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge," Larry Bunyan is certain his demure wife is secretly out at night with deadbeat swingers, shooting drugs and having wild sex, while in "I Ordained the Devil," the Bishop of Barntrosna confesses that his ordination of Father Packie Cooley was really an ordination of His Satanic Majesty.Another Barntrosna resident, Dr. John Joe Parkes, discovers "The Valley of the Flying Jennets," the secret place in the mountains created by his Dr. Frankenstein--type medical ancestor where his horrible, mutated genetic failures live. In the concluding "Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," Noreen escapes Barntrosna, goes to London for nursing school, finds a lesbian lover, and teams up with her to rob and terrorize London until her mother, boyfriend and parish priest bring Noreen back home.With sly wit, characteristic, brilliant blending of sadness and humor and macabre genius, Mondo Desperado is a wonderfully imagined work of fiction--McCabe's most dazzling yet--from a truly original literary talent.

About the Author
Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. He has published four other novels, Music on Clinton Street (1986), Carn (1989), The Butcher Boy (1992), and The Dead School (1995). He cowrote with director Neil Jordan the screenplay for The Butcher Boy and is finishing a collection of stories.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Patrick McCabe has long been recognized as a writer of rare talent and unique voice, whose vision of the world is so distinctive that "McCabesque" has become an adjective with multiple meanings, including "exquisitely, beautifully, mad in the head!"

He was a Booker Prize finalist for The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Aer Lingus/Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was made into a motion picture directed by Neil Jordan and cowritten by McCabe and Jordan. He was again a Booker Prize finalist for Breakfast on Pluto, which won the Spirit of Life Arts/Sunday Independent Irish Literature Award and was a number one international bestseller.

McCabe has been described as "the lodestone of new Irish fiction" (Wall Street Journal), "a dark. genius of incongruity and the grotesque" (Sunday Observer) and "one of Ireland's finest living writers" (New York Times Book Review).

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented on McCabe's "remarkable...ability to induce compassion for the unlikeliest people," and in Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel, that ability and the full range of his "grotesque genius" (Marie Claire) combine to produce a brilliant, macabre' dementedly funny and surreally imagined fiction of intertwined narratives set in a small Irish town. McCabe himself has described Mondo Desperado as being "like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio — on drugs."

In his mondo tales of the insular town of Barntrosna, McCabe assembles a distinctly Irish crew of odd and unusual inhabitants who live on and regularly cross, often unconsciously, the border between fantasy and reality. In "Hot Nights at theGo-Go Lounge," Larry Bunyan is certain his demure wife is secretly out at night with deadbeat swingers, shooting drugs and having wild sex, while in "I Ordained the Devil," the Bishop of Barntrosna confesses that his ordination of Father Packie Cooley was really an ordination of His Satanic Majesty.

Another Barntrosna resident, Dr. John Joe Parkes, discovers "The Valley of the Flying Jennets," the secret place in the mountains created by his Dr. Frankenstein — type medical ancestor where his horrible, mutated genetic failures live. In the concluding "Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," Noreen escapes Barntrosna, goes to London for nursing school, finds a lesbian lover, and teams up with her to rob and terrorize London until her mother, boyfriend and parish priest bring Noreen back home.

With sly wit, characteristic, brilliant blending of sadness and humor and macabre genius, Mondo Desperado is a wonderfully imagined work of fiction — McCabe's most dazzling yet — rom a truly original literary talent.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

If you spliced Gualtiero Jacopetti's shockumentary Mondo films with the surreal clippings from the "Cruiskeen Lawn" newspaper column of Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O'Brien), the comic result might be this "serial novel" of short stories, shaggy dog tales and spoofs from the fictitious pen of McCabe's authorial desperado, Phildy Hackball, set in his crazy village of Barntrosna. Even stranger and campier than McCabe's recent Booker-shortlisted Breakfast on Pluto, these 10 intertwined stories mix loony subject matter culled from trashy paperbacks with Hibernian stereotypes and cliches. Like an Irish bull in a china shop, McCabe hilariously charges through yarns about genetically engineered winged donkeys ("The Valley of the Flying Jennets"), yokel farmers picked up in discotheques ("The Boils of Thomas Gully") and a pious schoolboy blown up not with a bomb but a tire pump ("The Bursted Priest"). The maniac citizens of Barntrosna somehow believe their wives are secret go-go dancers ("Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge"); the local Chinese takeaway is Bruce Lee's secret hangout ("My Friend Bruce Lee"); and the bishop's clerical protege was really Lucifer stirring up the swinging '60s ("I Ordained the Devil"). In a satire on McCabe's own career ("The Big Prize"), Barntrosna's unlikeliest novelist takes the mickey out of contemporary Irish writers and the award-lavishing British literary establishment. Only in the last, lengthy story, "The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," does this pulp fiction gag almost run aground, when Barntrosna's nicest student nurse goes to London, where she discovers lesbian love and drug racketeering before she is safely returned to the picturesque, demented town of McCabe's berserk imagination. 8-city author tour; 15-city NPR radio campaign. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal