Cork author launches debut children's novel about a girl in a haunted land

Welcome To Dead Town Raven McKay, by Eibhlís Carcione (Everything With Words €11)

STARTING school in a new town is a daunting experience.

Classrooms to find, timetables to comprehend, and teachers’ names to learn, while trying to ‘fit in’ with other students whose social networks are already long established.

It is likely much harder still if you’ve just arrived at your third foster home in the six months since your parents vanished without trace, and if the dead make up around half of your new classmates.

If Raven McKay didn’t get a sense of foreboding from the name of the town, she certainly realises there is something unusual about Grave’s Pass when, on her first day, she sees “pooka horses chasing goblins in a vacant lot, three banshees on a bus, a zombie in ripped jeans staring in the window of a phone shop, a bogeyman walking a labradoodle, a ghost on a ladder cleaning windows, a ghoul sipping coffee at an outdoor café”.

Clutching the only things her parents left her - a battered suitcase bearing a black butterfly sticker, and a cryptic note about the contents of the case - Raven steps into a community where the living and the dead exist side by side.

Black butterflies, associated with the souls of the dead in Irish folklore, are a powerful symbol in Welcome To Dead Town Raven McKay, the debut children’s novel by Cork poet, teacher, and author Eibhlís Carcione.

Well-versed in folklore and mythology, Eibhlís said both the butterfly image and the idea for her central character arrived in her mind while she slept.

“Raven came to me in a dream,” she said. 

I saw this girl with dark hair and a hat with a raven feather, and a suitcase with a black butterfly, and little black butterflies embroidered on her blouse

“She was on a street in a very hilly town with cobbled streets, archways, and I just saw her and it was like she was saying ‘tell my story’. I began to write and the first few pages came quickly, so then I felt there was a story there,” said Eibhlís, adding that the setting of Grave’s Pass was inspired both by the steep streets near her home in St Luke’s, and hillside villages in Sicily where her family spends holidays.

As the plot developed, Eibhlís also drew on her teaching experience to create a character forced to rely on her own instincts as she navigates a new life without parental protection.

“I taught for a time in a school where there were foster children and they told me lots of stories about their lives,” said Eibhlís. 

They were very upbeat kids but I remember one girl in particular whose foster parents had gone off on a holiday and they had left her with some relative that wasn’t nice. For children to be put in that situation is very hard.

For Raven “it’s about finding her way” alone, in a new family, a new town, and a new school where it’s hard to tell whether the students are alive or dead, let alone whether their offers of friendship are genuine.

“In Grave’s Pass, you have the ‘humes’, which are humans, and then you have the dead, and in her school some of them are humes and some are the dead and she has to find out who to trust,” said Eibhlís.

“There are frenemies, and one particular character who presents as a friend. She [Raven] wants to make friends and fit in and there are a few characters that she’s really drawn to, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the best friends, and what is presented may not be friendship.

“For a while, like a lot of children I’ve seen as a teacher, you want to do things to make others happy, whereas sometimes you have to look at yourself - are you happy with yourself?

She begins to listen to herself and she realises she must dig deep in herself and find strength.

Though her book speaks of the loneliness and loss of the person left inexplicably bereft, it is also an affirmation of the continued spiritual closeness of the dead to the living.

Welcome To Dead Town Raven McKay is at its heart a mystery, a “fun, creepy book, but there are themes running through it, dealt with in a subtle way”, said Eibhlís.

“There’s a lot of me in it too. No matter what you write, a lot of yourself seeps in. There’s my own loss, and I’ve taught children who’ve lost parents, siblings, so that is there, running through it,” she said.

However, for Eibhlís, who has previously published three poetry collections in Irish, Tonn Chlíodhna, Eala Oíche, and Bean Róin, her first children’s novel also gave her chance to indulge in gothic spookiness.

“I’ve included a white lady, a legend from Ireland - if you see the white lady, misfortune can befall you - and I’ve always liked the bogeyman so I have a bogeyman and a redcap, a wicked gnome from folklore. I’ve included what I like,” she said.

Next up, said Eibhlís, “I’m working on something new. but I’m not ruling out a return to Dead Town and the Raven story because it is a story close to my heart.”