The Pooka’s Revenge

Thesis

In Give Them Unquiet Dreams, the pooka is not a decorative Celtic flourish but the novel’s governing principle — at once its engine of plot, its key to theme, and the hinge of its ending — set within a Yeatsian frame that supplies the novel’s title, its family name, and its closing poem. Mulhern takes the folkloric logic of the púca — a shapeshifting spirit whose revenge is provoked by the disturbance of its dwelling and whose “veiled messages” prophesy the future — and bends it to four purposes at once. First, it generates the plot as a sequence of shapeshifting visitations that escalate from a Boston bus to an Irish island and finally to the rim of the Grand Canyon, each animal form (cat, goat, horse, eagle) a refraction of a single hostile intelligence. Second, it externalizes the novel’s central epistemological conflict between Irish “second sight” and American psychiatric diagnosis — the novel’s great inversion, in which the “mad” see and the “sane” are blind — making the pooka the figure through which the family’s inherited way of seeing is both vindicated and punished. Third, it becomes the dark instrument of a deeper drama of guilt and atonement: the pooka’s revenge is the mirror in which Aiden Glencar confronts his own survivor’s guilt — the conviction that he is responsible for his brother Martin’s death in the water — and the novel’s water imagery, at once baptismal and fatal, binds the family’s ancestral sin at the well to Martin’s sacrificial drowning and, finally, to his resurrection from the sea. Fourth — and most consequentially — it prepares an Oedipal ending in which the protagonist’s lifelong quest for the truth culminates in a blinding recognition, “I am the ghost,” that collapses the distinction between the haunted and the haunter, the seer and the seen. The pooka, in short, is Mulhern’s Irish answer to the Greek oracle: a force of fate that speaks in riddles, demands its price, and finally turns the hero’s sight back upon himself.

I. The Pooka in Irish Folklore

To read the novel’s pooka accurately, it helps to recall what the tradition actually holds. The púca (anglicized “pooka,” from the Old Irish púca, itself possibly cognate with the English puck) is one of the most protean figures in the Irish supernatural repertoire: a solitary fairy or spirit that assumes animal form — most classically a black horse, but also a goat, a cat, a hare, a dog, an eagle, or a human with telltale animal features. It is a trickster, capricious rather than reliably malevolent, sometimes helpful and sometimes cruel, and it is strongly bound to the turning points of the agricultural and ritual year, especially Samhain, when the boundary between this world and the other thins. Two traits matter most for Mulhern’s purposes. The first is the púca’s association with speech and prophecy: the creature can talk, and its utterances are understood as riddling forecasts of what is to come. The second is its capacity for vengeance: folk accounts repeatedly tie the púca’s malice to a specific grievance — a field ploughed, a well fouled, a dwelling disturbed — after which the spirit harries a family, sometimes “for generations.” Mulhern plants both traits verbatim in his text, and they become the load-bearing joints of the entire narrative. (How far Mulhern departs from this tradition — and what he makes of those departures — is the subject of Section IX below.)

II. Yeats and the Celtic Twilight: The Novel’s Literary Frame

The pooka arrives in the novel already wrapped in Yeats. Mulhern’s title, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is lifted from “The Stolen Child” (1889), and the poem is printed in full at the novel’s close, so that the last words the reader encounters are “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” The novel is framed, in effect, by Yeats’s faery cosmology — the Celtic Twilight belief that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who lure, steal, and whisper, and that the boundary between this world and the other is thin. The pooka is Mulhern’s dark realization of Yeats’s faery: where Yeats’s faeries “give them unquiet dreams” by whispering in the trout’s ears, Mulhern’s pooka gives Aiden unquiet dreams by whispering “veiled messages” of the future.

The Yeatsian layer runs deeper than the title. The family name itself — Glencar — is drawn from the poem’s third stanza, “Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car,” and Mrs. O’Malley, in Ireland, half-remembers it: “Something about a magical place called Glencar in County Sligo . . . I know there was Glencar somewhere in the verse” (Chapter Sixteen). The family is, literally, named for the poem’s enchanted landscape — the Glencars are the stolen child’s kin, and the novel is the story of what the faeries took from them. The refrain of “The Stolen Child” sounds at the novel’s pivotal moment of death, when Aiden is caught in the riptide and hears “children’s voices: ‘Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild’” (Chapter Fifteen), and again when Martin disappears beneath the water: “’Away with us he’s going,’ the children said.” The faeries of the title poem are not a decorative allusion; they are the agents of the novel’s central loss, the ones who steal Martin away “to the waters and the wild.”

Yeats supplies the novel’s other key images, too. The grandmother’s photograph album records “Our Trip to Innisfree,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is copied into it — “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” (Chapter Ten) — the Yeatsian dream of a return to Ireland that the family’s pilgrimage to Achill finally, and tragically, fulfills. Rita recites “The Wild Swans at Coole” in the Boston Public Garden, its closing question — “Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day / To find they have flown away?” (Chapter Fourteen) — a meditation on time and loss that the novel’s own elegy for Martin will answer. And the black cat on the plane, a pooka in feline form, is named Minnaloushe, after Yeats’s own cat in “The Cat and the Moon” — the poet’s familiar turned, in Mulhern’s hands, into the shapeshifter’s mask.

What Yeats gives the novel, above all, is a cosmology in which the supernatural is real and the dead are near. The Celtic Twilight — Yeats’s name for the Irish folk belief in faeries, second sight, and the thin places where the worlds meet — is the novel’s native element. Aiden’s second sight, his grandfather’s visitations, the pooka’s shapeshifting, the seal that becomes Martin: all of these belong to the world Yeats spent his life collecting and defending against the rationalism that would dismiss them as superstition. Mulhern’s novel is, in this sense, a late work of the Celtic Twilight — a fiction that takes Yeats’s faery faith seriously, and finds in it the machinery of tragedy, guilt, and grace.

The Yeatsian frame is not merely allusive; it is biographical. Yeats was himself the great collector of the very folklore the novel draws on. His Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and The Celtic Twilight (1893) gathered the Sligo country stories of faeries, púcas, second sight, and the dead — and Sligo was Yeats’s own country, the home of his mother’s family, the Pollexfens, where he spent his childhood summers and first heard the tales he would spend his life defending. The novel’s grandmother is “from County Sligo,” and the pooka’s grievance — the disturbed well, the stolen berries — is set in precisely the landscape Yeats made the native ground of the Celtic Twilight. Mulhern has planted his fiction in Yeats’s Sligo, and the novel’s supernatural machinery — second sight, ancestral visitation, the shapeshifting pooka — is the very material Yeats collected and, in essays like “Magic” (1901), argued was not superstition but reality: “the borders of our mind are ever shifting,” Yeats wrote, “and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.” Aiden’s gift of reading thoughts, his grandfather’s nightly visits, the dead who never leave — all of this is Yeats’s “single mind,” the Great Memory, made narrative.

Yeats’s later work deepens the novel’s ending. The aged man who haunts the novel’s close — Aiden grown “gray-haired,” teaching “The Dead” in a cold Boston classroom, and finally revealed as the “old man with glasses” his mother drew — is Yeats’s aged man: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick” (“Sailing to Byzantium”), the soul longing to be gathered “into the artifice of eternity.” And the teacher among restless students, watching them “gazing at adolescent faces,” is Yeats’s “Among School Children,” the old man among the young, wondering at what he has become. Even Yeats’s epitaph — “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” — is present in the novel’s horse, the pooka’s most classic form, the “dark horse with golden eyes” that killed Sinead at the well and the horse that kills the mother at the canyon. Yeats’s horseman, who passes cold-eyed over life and death, becomes Mulhern’s pooka, the shapeshifter who passes through the family’s generations, cold-eyed, taking what it is owed. The novel, read this way, is a fiction that completes what Yeats began: a Celtic Twilight in which the faeries are real, the dead are near, and the horseman always passes by.

III. The Genesis of the Revenge: How the Vendetta Begins

The subplot of the pooka’s revenge is established in a single nocturnal colloquy that functions as the novel’s interpretive key. In Chapter Two, Aiden’s dead grandfather — himself a spirit, and thus a figure who straddles the very boundary the pooka inhabits — names the old woman who has been tormenting Aiden on the bus:

“I think she’s a pooka. Even on this side, there are some things we don’t know for certain.” (Chapter Two)

The grandfather then supplies the folklore, almost as a field ethnographer would, and in doing so gives the reader the novel’s rulebook:

“A pooka is an evil spirit not to be trusted. In Ireland, the rural folk believed that nature was full of spirits who inhabited every place in the natural world — trees, mountains, streams, and wells, for example. If a human disturbs these spaces, the spirits get mad and seek revenge. The dwelling of a pooka is the worst place to unsettle. This trickster spirit may seek revenge on the family. For generations, even. Be careful of this woman. If she is a pooka, she can change her form into a variety of animals — a cat, a goat, a horse, even an eagle. A shape shifter, the Irish call them. And listen to what she says. Often, pookas relay veiled messages about your future.” (Chapter Two)

Every element of the subsequent plot is prefigured here: the revenge, the generational reach, the catalogue of animal forms, and the “veiled messages.” What the grandfather does not yet say is why the pooka has come for this particular family. The answer arrives from the pooka’s own mouth, in Chapter Four, when the old woman finally names herself:

“Moira le Fay.” (Chapter Four)

The name is a deliberate fusion: “Moira” (from the Greek Moirai, the Fates who spin, measure, and cut the thread of life) joined to “le Fay” (Morgan le Fay, the shapeshifting enchantress of Arthurian legend). She is, at once, fate and fairy. And when Aiden demands why she will not leave him alone, she supplies the grievance that sets the whole revenge in motion:

“But I’ve known ya family for generations. Your kin disturbed my well and stole my berries. You make me sick.” (Chapter Four)

Here is the origin of the subplot, stated with folkloric economy: the Glencar family, somewhere in the Irish past, desecrated the pooka’s dwelling — fouled her well, stole her berries — and the spirit has pursued them across the Atlantic and down the generations. The novel’s title, taken from Yeats’s “The Stolen Child,” quietly rhymes with this grievance: the faeries of Yeats’s poem also steal (“reddest stolen cherries”), and the stolen child is carried off “to the waters and the wild.” The pooka’s accusation of theft is the novel’s dark inversion of that lullaby — the family that stole from the fairies now finds itself stolen from, harried, and finally bereaved.

The full horror of the grievance is revealed only later, in Chapter Fourteen, when Rita tells Aiden the story of his great-grandmother. The pooka’s revenge is not prospective; it has already claimed its first victim, at the very well that was disturbed:

“Sinead and your grandmother were out picking berries to make jam. They’d been arguing. Catherine was a young girl, thirteen or so. . . . They were standing by an old well. As they were arguing, your grandmother dropped the pail. Then a dark horse with golden eyes appeared. Catherine was so astonished that she ran across the field. The horse galloped passed Sinead, knocking her into the wall. The stones crumbled, and she fell to her death.” (Chapter Fourteen)

The “dark horse with golden eyes” is the pooka in its most classic form, and the well is its dwelling. The revenge, then, is already a generation old when the novel opens: the pooka killed Sinead at the well, and it will kill again — the horse at the Grand Canyon is the same horse, the same golden-eyed intelligence, completing the arc that began at the well. And here, too, is the seed of the novel’s guilt: “from that day forward, Catherine blamed herself.” The grandmother carried a “restless feeling of guilt” her whole life for a death that was not her fault, and Rita’s warning to Aiden — “we all carry needless feelings inside, and they can hurt us to the core” — is the novel’s quiet prophecy of Aiden’s own guilt to come.

IV. The Shapeshifter Manifested: Scene by Scene

The grandfather’s catalogue — “a cat, a goat, a horse, even an eagle” — is not incidental description; it is a cue-index that the novel then works through, scene by scene, so that the pooka’s presence is felt even in passages that read as ordinary realism. The revenge is manifested as a sequence of transformations, each keyed to one of the promised forms.

The old woman on the bus (Chapter Two). The pooka first appears in human guise, a “woman in the floral dress” with “milky” gray eyes who follows Aiden and whispers the slur he most dreads: “You little faggot.” The sulfur on her breath marks her as otherworldly — the smell of the infernal, or of the disturbed earth. She is the pooka’s first, most intimate form: the voice that names the shame Aiden “refused to acknowledge, even when alone.”

Moira le Fay at Aunt Clara’s (Chapter Four). The same woman reappears, now self-identified, and demonstrates the pooka’s signature bodily instability. When Aiden slams the car door on her hand, “A finger dropped on the rug. I ground my sneaker on it until it was a pile of dust.” A normal ghost might vanish; the pooka’s flesh disintegrates and reconstitutes, because it is not flesh at all but form — a shape temporarily assumed. Her taunts here are pure omen-speech: “One day you’ll choke on that. You may even die,” and “Your brother won’t always be ‘round to protect ya” — both of which the novel will, in time, make good.

Moira at the homecoming and in the car (Chapters Seven and Eleven). She appears “behind the car” when Aiden’s mother comes home, “laughing, exposing yellow, rotten teeth,” and later whispers in the moving car, “Maybe you’ll be locked up in a looney bin like your ma.” The pooka’s cruelty is always aimed at the precise wound: Aiden’s terror of being institutionalized as his mother was, of being diagnosed as mad for the very gift he shares with her.

The eagle and the death of Nell (Chapter Twelve). The catalogue’s most oblique form is realized in the story of Nell, the patient who “thought an eagle was chasing me down the hall” and, swinging a broom at the phantom, drove a splinter of wood into her own eye and died of a stroke. The eagle — one of the pooka’s promised shapes — here kills by blinding, a detail whose full weight the ending will reveal.

The collapse into ashes (Chapter Twelve). At the dance, when Aiden finally turns on her and “banged her head against a steel cross,” “Her body collapsed into a heap of white ashes. A rush of acrid air passed my face.” The pooka is unmade and remade; the boy’s violence is real, but its object is not. Martin, seeing only snow, asks why his brother was “screaming at the wall.” The scene crystallizes the novel’s central question: is Aiden seeing what is really there, or is he mad? The pooka’s ash-collapse keeps the answer suspended.

The horse (Chapter Fourteen). In the Boston Public Garden, Aiden asks Rita whether a passing horse was “a pooka,” and Rita, the novel’s voice of kindly skepticism, dismisses it: “The folk in County Sligo, where your grandmother lived, were convinced the horse was a pooka . . . I don’t believe it. And neither should you. It’s foolishness and ancient superstition.” Yet the novel will prove Rita wrong, and at the worst possible cost.

The cat on the plane (Chapter Sixteen). Flying to Ireland, a black cat “with golden eyes” — Minnaloushe, named for Yeats’s own cat — “jumped across the aisle, bit me, and scratched my arms,” while the woman across the aisle sings the same song the phantom roommate once sang. Aiden’s retrospective voice makes the connection explicit: “Was that wild cat an incarnation of the old woman who had menaced me when I was young? And was the pooka behind the curtain that day we tried to help my mother escape?” The cat is the pooka’s third form, and its attack is the revenge closing in.

The goat on Achill (Chapter Seventeen). On the island road, “A large goat charged my mother,” then stood motionless on a ledge, “the rectangular black pupils of his golden eyes . . . fixed on us.” A farm boy disperses it with a warding cry — “Mallach De’ ort!” (“the curse of God on you”) — and produces a brass pocket watch stopped at “one minute past three.” The goat is the pooka’s fourth form; the stopped watch is a time-omen, a “veiled message” about the hour that is coming.

The horse at the Grand Canyon (Chapter Eighteen). The catalogue completes itself, and the revenge reaches its climax, in the novel’s most devastating sentence: “On the third day of her visit to the Grand Canyon, she died. A man lost control of his horse while my mother and Lucy stood at Ooh Aah Point . . . The pooka again?” The horse — the pooka’s most classic form, the same “dark horse” that killed Sinead at the well — kills Aiden’s mother, exactly as the “veiled messages” foretold. The revenge that began with a disturbed well in Ireland ends with a fall into an American canyon.

V. Veiled Messages: Prophecy as Plot

The second half of the grandfather’s definition — “Often, pookas relay veiled messages about your future” — is the device by which folklore becomes structure. The novel plants a single cryptic refrain and then pays it off across three hundred pages. The refrain is the song the phantom roommate sings behind the curtain during the failed escape:

“Raindrops keep falling on my head. Ooh aah.” (Chapter Nine)

The song first appears as mere atmosphere — the half-heard voice of a woman Aiden’s mother insists “never had a roommate.” It recurs on the plane to Ireland, sung by the cat’s owner during the turbulence, and Aiden is the one who hears the echo: “That song . . . Reminds me of your roommate years ago at McCall’s.” Finally, at the Grand Canyon, the novel closes the loop with chilling precision: the mother dies at a place literally named “Ooh Aah Point,” during “a sudden rainstorm,” and Aiden’s retrospective voice supplies the interpretation the reader has been waiting for:

“The pooka again? The lady had sung, ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head. Ooh aah. Ooh aah.’ Pookas relay veiled messages about your future, my grandfather said.” (Chapter Eighteen)

The song’s nonsense syllables — “Ooh aah” — turn out to have been, all along, the name of the place where the mother would die. This is prophecy operating as plot: the pooka does not merely menace; it announces, and the novel’s suspense lies in the reader’s dawning recognition that every taunt is a hinge the future will turn on. The “raindrops” are the rain that will fall at the canyon; the “ooh aah” is the overlook itself. Mulhern has built his plot on the folkloric premise that the supernatural speaks in riddles that time will translate — and he has made the reader, like Aiden, a belated decoder of the omen.

VI. The Weight of Guilt: Martin’s Sacrifice and the Water Metaphor

The pooka’s revenge would remain a merely external horror were it not for what it awakens in Aiden: a guilt so deep that it becomes the novel’s true subject. That guilt has a precise origin, and it is inseparable from water.

The drowning. Martin is the family’s swimmer — “His friends called him Seal because of his agility in the water” (Chapter Three). At the beach, Aiden, who “swam badly,” follows his brother into the surf and is caught in a riptide. The pooka is present even here, in its horse form, dragging the boy under:

“My feet got tangled in something under the water, and I panicked. I felt my legs being dragged by what felt like a horse’s mane. ‘I’m caught in seaweed!’ My head dropped beneath the surface of the water. . . . Martin swam toward me. Thunder rumbled, lightning crackled, and rain pelted my face. I heard children’s voices: ‘Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’” (Chapter Fifteen)

The Yeats refrain sounds at the moment of death, and the faeries of the poem claim their child — but not the child they were reaching for. “Martin was about ten feet away, and then he disappeared.” The children’s voices supply the poem’s final line: “’Away with us he’s going,’ the children said.” Martin, the strong swimmer, dies; Aiden, the weak one, is pulled from the water. “Two days later, Martin’s body washed up.”

The guilt. The substitution is the source of Aiden’s lifelong torment. He is alive because Martin is dead, and he cannot forgive himself for it:

“I blamed myself for his death. And then I blamed God for stealing him from us so young. He was just a child. I was angry at everyone and everything.” (Chapter Fifteen)

The guilt is not a passing grief but a wound that organizes the rest of his life — the decades of depression, the psychiatrist, the suppression of his second sight, the retreat into solitude. And it is inherited: the novel has already shown us the same guilt in the grandmother, who “blamed herself” for Sinead’s fall into the well. The pooka’s revenge “for generations, even” is matched, generation for generation, by the family’s guilt. What Catherine felt at the well, Aiden feels at the sea. The two water-deaths — the well and the ocean — are the novel’s paired sites of ancestral sin, and the guilt they breed is the family’s true curse, darker and more durable than the pooka itself.

The guilt also has a second, quieter source: shame. Aiden’s terror of his own queerness — “my shame about being gay” (Chapter Twelve) — is the wound the pooka’s first taunt (“You little faggot”) exploits, and it is bound up with the guilt, because Aiden believes he is the wrong kind of son, the wrong kind of brother, the one who should have died instead of Martin. The pooka, in naming the shame, forces Aiden to carry it into the open, where it festers into the belief that he is the family’s burden and its ruin.

The water metaphor. Water is the novel’s central element, and it carries a double valence — death and rebirth — that Mulhern draws directly from the Catholic imagination. The well is the site of the original sin (Sinead’s death, the pooka’s grievance); the ocean is the site of the sacrifice (Martin’s death); the sea is the site of the resurrection (Martin’s return). The pooka itself is defined by its exile from water: “Now I live in a land where there is no water. God help me” (Chapter Four). The pooka lives in drought — the fouled well, the stolen water — while the family’s redemption is always figured as immersion, as baptism. Aiden’s grandmother speaks of grace as “water gushing from the rock at Rephidim and Kadesh” (Chapter One), the Mosaic image of living water struck from stone. And the novel’s governing metaphor of time is itself aqueous: “Like Thoreau, I believe time is merely a stream we swim in. Someday the current of water will slip away, taking us with it, but the sandy bottom, eternity, will remain . . . I am certain, however, of the buoy that saves us — hope” (Chapter Fifteen). Water, in Mulhern’s hands, is the medium through which the dead pass and through which they return — the element of drowning and of baptism at once.

VII. Blindness and Sight: The Novel’s Inversion

Beneath the pooka’s revenge and the drama of guilt runs the novel’s most persistent theme, stated outright by the grandfather and then worked through every scene: the inversion of sight and blindness. In Give Them Unquiet Dreams, those whom the world calls mad are the ones who see, and those whom the world calls sane are the ones who are blind.

The grandfather names the theme in a single line, when Aiden asks why he sees ghosts: “Many are blind, but you have the gift of sight” (Chapter Nine). The gift is an da shealladh, second sight, inherited through the maternal line — the grandmother’s mother, the mother Laura, and now Aiden. But the novel’s point is that this “gift” is not an addition to ordinary sight; it is a correction of it. Ordinary sight, the novel insists, is a form of blindness. The grandfather’s parting words to Aiden make the stakes explicit, quoting Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious . . . Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed” (Chapter Two). Blindness, here, is not the absence of vision but the absence of wonder — a spiritual deadness that the merely sighted suffer. And the grandfather’s final instruction is the novel’s imperative: “Keep your eyes open. Life is more mysterious than you could ever imagine” (Chapter Two).

The novel’s central tragedy is that this true sight is pathologized. Laura’s second sight — her visions of the “ghost” — is diagnosed as schizophrenia, and she is institutionalized for it. Aiden, who shares the gift, lives in terror of the same fate: the pooka’s taunt, “Maybe you’ll be locked up in a looney bin like your ma,” is aimed precisely at this fear. The world’s “cure” for the seer is to blind her — to medicate the vision away, to call the truth a symptom. Mulhern’s irony is that the clinicians, the rational adults, the well-meaning family who insist the visions are illness are themselves the blind ones. When Aiden smashes the pooka against the wall and she collapses into ashes, Martin sees only “snow”; when the horse appears in the Public Garden, Rita sees only “a wild horse on its way home”; when the phantom roommate sings behind the curtain, the mother insists she “never had a roommate.” The sane characters, one after another, fail to see what is before them. It is the “mad” who see clearly.

The pooka is the emblem of this inversion. Its eyes are “milky” — clouded, the look of blindness — yet it is the one creature in the novel that sees the future entire. The pooka’s “veiled messages” are the future made visible, and its milky eyes see what the clear-eyed cannot. The cost of that sight is written in Nell’s death: the patient who glimpsed the pooka’s eagle form died when a splinter of wood “impaled her eye” (Chapter Twelve). To see the pooka is to risk the eye itself — a warning the novel’s ending will make literal.

The biblical anchor of the theme is Mark 8:18, which Aiden’s mother has written on the back of one of her drawings: “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?” (Chapter Eighteen). The verse is Christ’s rebuke to the disciples, and Mulhern repurposes it as the novel’s own question to its rational characters — and to its reader. The drawings themselves are the novel’s deepest image of sight: Laura, the “mad” woman, drew what she saw with her second sight, and what she drew was the truth — the ghost, the future, her son grown old. Her “madness” was a seeing that the family, in its blindness, could not bear to look at.

The blindness and sight at stake here are almost never literal. Mulhern works the theme through many metaphorical registers, each a different way of seeing or failing to see. Sight is knowledge — the Mark 8:18 rebuke, “Do you have eyes but fail to see,” is a question about understanding, not optics. Sight is wonder — the grandfather’s Einstein, “his eyes are dimmed,” names the spiritual deadness of those who have stopped marveling. Sight is love — the psychic’s warning that “reading loved ones is difficult because our emotional ties get in the way” (Chapter Two) makes clear that the closest sight is the most clouded. Sight is prophecy — the pooka’s “veiled messages” are the future seen whole. And blindness, in turn, is not a physical condition but a moral one: it is denial, Aiden’s lifelong “I refused to look” at his mother’s drawings — “I resented all that lay on the table before me, and I had stubbornly refused to look at it while she was alive” (Chapter Eighteen) — the refusal to see the truth about himself; it is shame, the refusal to look at one’s own queerness; it is the rational world’s limit, Martin’s “snow” and Rita’s “wild horse,” the ordinary eye that cannot admit what it sees. The novel’s great achievement is to make sight and blindness wholly figurative — a matter of attention, love, faith, and courage — so that the ending’s cracked lenses are not a physical injury but the symbolic breaking of every refusal that has kept Aiden blind.

The theme culminates, as it must, in the ending’s cracked lenses. Aiden slips on the ice, and “My glasses flew off . . . Through the cracked lenses, I saw Martin” (Chapter Eighteen). The breaking of his ordinary sight is the condition of his true sight: only through the cracked lenses does he see his brother, and only through them does he see, at last, the ghost for what it is — himself. “I looked through my broken glasses at his wounded face.” The novel’s final paradox is that blindness and sight are not opposites but inversions: to see truly, Aiden must first be blinded. The cracked lenses are not the loss of sight but its correction — the shattering of the illusion that kept him from seeing himself, his brother, and the dead who never left. In Give Them Unquiet Dreams, sight is not given to the clear-eyed; it is given to the broken, the mad, and the grieving — and the blind are the ones who think they see.

The cracked lenses are, more precisely, the price of the gift — the cost at which second sight is bought, and the novel makes clear that both mother and son pay it. Laura’s second sight cost her her ordinary life: her visions of the ghost were diagnosed as schizophrenia, and the institution “blinded” her in its own way — medicated, confined, her seeing called madness. Aiden’s second sight cost him, at the end, his ordinary sight: the cracked lenses are the moment his everyday vision breaks and his true vision is restored. Even before that, he had tried to blind himself — “I completely suppressed my visions and intuitions” (Chapter Fifteen) — refusing the gift the way the world had refused his mother’s. The two blindings are one and the same exchange. The mother who saw too much was blinded by the world; the son who refused to see is blinded by the truth. To possess second sight, the novel insists, is to be weighed against the ordinary world and found wanting — and the cracked glasses are the scales on which that reckoning is made. What the mother paid with her freedom, the son pays with his sight; and in both, the blinding is the condition of the seeing.

VIII. A Syncretic Theology: Catholicism, Folklore, and the Greek Myth

What makes Give Them Unquiet Dreams more than a ghost story is the way Mulhern braids three traditions — Irish Catholicism, Irish folklore, and Greek myth — into a single theology of guilt, sacrifice, and resurrection.

Martin as savior. Martin is the novel’s Christ-figure, and the water makes him so. He is the rescuer — “Martin would always rescue me” (Chapter Twelve) — who dies in Aiden’s place, a substitutionary sacrifice in which the strong brother takes the weak brother’s death. His body “washed up” from the sea, as if the water were delivering him back. His promise, made in life and kept in death, is the novel’s refrain of grace: “I told you I would always have your back” (Chapter Eighteen), and, at the bedside, “It wasn’t your fault. I never left you, and I never will.” Martin is the one who absolves — “Martin, please forgive me,” Aiden prays at Keem Bay (Chapter Seventeen) — and the one who returns.

The good transfiguration. The novel’s most beautiful scene is a transfiguration that answers, and reverses, the pooka’s evil shapeshifting. At Keem Bay, as Aiden and his mother scatter Martin’s ashes — “Martin became part of the ocean” — a seal appears in the water, and then it is no longer a seal:

“The gray head with its large eyes and snout stuck out of the water. . . . And then it was no longer a seal. Martin emerged from the sea. He was as we remembered him — jeans, a black leather jacket, and a scally cap.” (Chapter Seventeen)

The seal is Martin’s own nickname — “Seal” — and so the creature is not a disguise but a revelation: the animal form is not a pooka’s mask but the true shape of the beloved, risen. Where the pooka’s transformations are demonic — a hostile intelligence donning cat, goat, horse, and eagle to harm — Martin’s transformation is redemptive: the dead brother returns in his namesake animal, “smiling and waving,” to tell them “he’s happy.” The two transfigurations are the novel’s moral poles: the pooka’s metamorphosis is the parody, Martin’s the reality. “Transfiguration” is, of course, itself a Christian word — Christ’s glorification on the mountain — and Mulhern quietly claims it for the resurrection of the ordinary, the return of the dead brother from the sea.

Why Achill, why Keem Bay. The setting of the resurrection is not incidental. Achill Island is the grandfather’s homeland — “At last we would visit my grandfather’s homeland and scatter Martin’s ashes in the sea” (Chapter Sixteen) — the ancestral ground where the family’s Irish story, and the pooka’s grievance, began. The pilgrimage to Achill is a return to the source, the closing of the circle that opened when Sinead fell into the well. And the island is itself a figure of the pooka: its Irish name, Acaill, is traditionally glossed as “eagle” — the medieval Annals of Loch Cé record it as Eccuill, Eagle Island — so the family returns, unknowingly, to an island named for one of the pooka’s own shapes, the eagle that killed Nell. Achill is also a liminal place: the novel describes it as “the edge of the world — the ocean, scattered boulders, rocky cliffs, riotous waves, and a horizon that overpowered” (Chapter Seventeen), a threshold where the land ends and the sea begins, exactly the kind of “thin place” where, in the Celtic Twilight tradition, the boundary between this world and the other grows permeable. Its history is a history of drowning — the Clew Bay Drowning of 1894 is memorialized in the island’s graveyard at Kildamhnait — and of the holy well that stands just outside that graveyard, the same doubled image of water as death and grace that runs through the whole novel. Keem Bay, a “horseshoe-shaped bay” cupped between the cliffs of Benmore and Croaghaun, is a natural sanctuary — an enclosed, sacred space where the dead can return. And the sea itself is the element of return: Martin “became part of the ocean” (Chapter Seventeen), and from the ocean he comes back, a seal become a brother. The novel’s geography encodes its theology: Ireland is the place of the supernatural, the return, the resurrection — while America, where the mother falls at the Grand Canyon, is the place of exile and loss. The family that left Ireland for Boston must return to Ireland to be made whole.

Resurrection: “we never die.” The novel’s metaphysics, announced in the Einstein epigraph — “The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” — and developed in the grandfather’s block-of-wood lesson (“a single existence”), is a fusion of Einsteinian block-time and Christian resurrection. The dead are not gone but adjacent: “When we pass on, we move into another room. Our departed loved ones are a short distance away — in that room just beyond the doorway” (Chapter Eighteen). Martin’s return as the seal, his bedside visitation, and the final vision of “a line of people . . . back to the moment of Creation” are all expressions of the same conviction: we never die; we only change rooms. The pooka, a creature that moves freely across forms and foretells the future, is the dark face of this same collapse of time — the past arriving as the future — and its cruelty is, in the end, the instrument that drives Aiden toward the consolation the novel finally offers.

Denial and absolution. The Catholic frame also gives the novel’s theme of denial its precise theological shape. In Christian tradition, denial is not mere ignorance but a sin — the sin of Peter, who denied Christ three times before the cock crowed, and who was restored only by confession and love. Aiden’s lifelong “I refused to look” is a denial in exactly this sense: a refusal to acknowledge the truth he already half-knows — that the ghost is himself, that he carries the guilt of Martin’s death, that he is the son and brother he fears he is. The novel’s arc is the Catholic arc from denial to confession to absolution. Aiden denies for decades; then, at Keem Bay, he confesses — “Martin, please forgive me” (Chapter Seventeen) — and he is absolved, first by his mother (“It wasn’t your fault, Aiden”) and finally by Martin himself at the bedside: “It wasn’t your fault. I never left you, and I never will” (Chapter Eighteen). The pooka, the novel’s agent of exposure, is what breaks the denial: its taunts and prophecies force Aiden to look at what he has refused to see, and the ending’s “Aiden, it’s time to forgive yourself” is the absolution that ends the denial. Where Peter’s denial was healed by Christ’s threefold question — “Do you love me?” — Aiden’s is healed by the mother’s drawing and the brother’s whisper, the novel’s own version of the same restoration.

The Greek thread. Over this Catholic and folkloric architecture, Mulhern lays the Greek myth. Moira le Fay is the Moirai — Fate — fused with Morgan le Fay and the pooka. Her “veiled messages” are the oracle’s riddles; the prophecy is fulfilled not despite but through the hero’s attempts to escape it, exactly as in Oedipus. And the ending, as Section X will show, is Oedipal in its very structure: the seeker who discovers he is the object of his own search, the blinding that accompanies recognition, the mother at the center of the tragedy. The novel’s genius is that these three systems — Catholic, folk, and Greek — do not compete but converge, all of them telling the same story: a wrong done, a price paid, a truth revealed, a love that outlasts death.

IX. Mulhern’s Pooka Against the Tradition

To measure what Mulhern has done, it is worth contrasting his pooka with the pooka of the folk tradition. The traditional púca is a trickster, not a monster: it plays pranks, leads travelers on wild night rides, spoils the blackberries after Samhain, and is as often helpful as harmful. Farmers appease it by leaving “the pooka’s share” of the harvest, and in many tales it is outwitted or simply wanders off. Its mischief is local and, in the end, survivable.

Mulhern’s pooka is none of these things. His pooka is a relentless, multi-generational avenger, bound to a single family grievance and incapable of being appeased. It is fused with figures the folk tradition never joined to it — Morgan le Fay, the Greek Fates, the banshee’s death-omen — so that it becomes not a trickster but a figure of fate. Its “veiled messages” are not riddles to be solved but prophecies to be fulfilled, and they are fatal: the “raindrops . . . ooh aah” refrain is a death sentence in disguise. And where the traditional pooka is ultimately harmless or outwitted, Mulhern’s pooka is never outwitted — it claims the mother’s life at the novel’s end, completing the arc that began with Sinead at the well.

Most radically, Mulhern’s pooka is theological. The traditional pooka belongs to a world of folk superstition; Mulhern’s pooka belongs to a world of sin, guilt, and grace. It is the dark instrument of a redemptive design: its revenge is what forces Aiden to confront the guilt he has carried since Martin’s death, and its cruelty is the goad that drives him, at last, toward forgiveness. The pooka is, in this novel, both the adversary and — paradoxically — the agent of the very absolution it seems to withhold. This is a distinctly Catholic reframing of the folk figure: the demon who, in the economy of grace, becomes the occasion of salvation. No traditional pooka tale does this, and it is the measure of Mulhern’s originality that he makes the folkloric creature bear the full weight of a Christian and Oedipal tragedy.

X. The Oedipal Ending

The novel’s ending is, by design, Oedipal — and the pooka is the instrument that makes it so. The parallel is structural, not incidental.

In Sophocles, Oedipus pursues the truth of who killed Laius, the source of Thebes’ plague, and discovers that the murderer he seeks is himself; the recognition (anagnorisis) is so unbearable that he puts out his own eyes. In Mulhern’s novel, Aiden pursues the truth of the “ghost” — the figure his mother obsessively drew, the apparition whose appearance “caused our family suffering — her stay in the psychiatric facility, my parents’ divorce, the separation of Martin and me.” Throughout the novel Aiden refuses to look at that drawing, associating it with “the chaos the ‘ghost’ created,” and he blames the ghost for everything: “The ghost was the focus of all my anger. I blamed him for everything bad that had happened” (Chapter Fifteen). Then, in the final pages, after his mother’s death, Aunt Clara sends him the drawings, and he finds the oldest one:

“At the bottom, an older sketch, yellowed and a bit smeared, depicted an old man with glasses. His lenses were cracked and a scar marred his cheek. I looked through my broken glasses at his wounded face. At the bottom, she had written, ‘Aiden, it’s time to forgive yourself.’ I am the ghost.” (Chapter Eighteen)

This is the novel’s anagnorisis, and it is devastating precisely because it inverts the entire quest — and the entire guilt. The ghost that haunted the family — the source of the mother’s madness and the family’s ruin — was Aiden himself, his future self, seen by his mother’s second sight across the collapse of time. The boy who blamed the ghost for “everything bad that had happened” discovers that he has been blaming himself. The seeker is the object of the search; the boy who set out to prove his mother sane discovers that he is the very figure whose apparition drove her to the institution. Like Oedipus, Aiden has been hunting himself — and, like Oedipus, the guilt he thought belonged to an external curse turns out to be his own.

The blinding motif completes the parallel. Oedipus gouges out his eyes; Aiden’s glasses crack. In the novel’s final scene, Aiden slips on the ice, and “My glasses flew off . . . Through the cracked lenses, I saw Martin.” The cracked lenses are the symbolic equivalent of Oedipus’s self-blinding — the price of seeing the truth — and they rhyme with a chain of eye-images that has run through the entire book: the grandfather’s warning that “his eyes are dimmed” who cannot wonder; the mother’s verse, “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?” (Mark 8:18); Nell’s eye impaled by the broom while she flailed at the phantom eagle; the “milky” gray eyes of the pooka herself. The novel has been, all along, a meditation on sight and its cost, and the ending pays it off: to see truly, Aiden must first be blinded — his lenses cracked, his vision of himself shattered and remade.

And the mother, as in Oedipus, is the center of the tragedy. Oedipus’s fate is bound to Jocasta, who hangs herself; Aiden’s is bound to Laura, who falls into the canyon. The pooka’s prophecy — “Raindrops keep falling on my head. Ooh aah” — is the novel’s oracle, and like all oracles it is fulfilled not despite but through the hero’s attempts to escape it. The family’s flight to Ireland, the pilgrimage to spread Martin’s ashes, the mother’s hopeful trip to the Grand Canyon — all are, in the end, the steps by which the prophecy walks itself to its conclusion.

Yet Mulhern’s ending is not Sophoclean despair but a Christian and Einsteinian consolation. Where Oedipus is left blind and exiled, Aiden is granted a vision: the dead “in that room just beyond the doorway,” Martin talking with Grandpa, the father with the mother, “a line of people . . . back to the moment of Creation.” The cracked lenses are not only a wound but a correction — the breaking of the illusion that the dead are gone, and of the guilt that kept Aiden from them. The pooka, whose revenge seemed pure malice, is revealed as the agent of a larger necessity: it forced Aiden to look at what he had refused to see, and in looking, to forgive himself. “Aiden, it’s time to forgive yourself.” The revenge, in its final turn, becomes a kind of grace — and Martin’s whispered absolution, “It wasn’t your fault. I never left you, and I never will,” is the answer to the guilt that the pooka’s cruelty first exposed.

Conclusion

Give Them Unquiet Dreams is a novel in which Irish folklore does the work that, in another tradition, fate and the oracle would do. The pooka is Mulhern’s chosen instrument because it is the one figure in the Irish supernatural repertoire that is simultaneously a shapeshifter, a prophet, and an avenger — a creature that can be a cat on an airplane, a goat on an island road, a horse at a canyon’s rim, and a voice singing a song whose nonsense syllables name the place of death. Through it, Mulhern binds his themes — second sight against psychiatry, queer identity against Catholic shame, inherited grief against the illusion of time — into a single narrative current, and he builds a plot whose every scene is a refraction of one folkloric premise: a wrong done in the past is repaid in the future, and the riddles the spirit speaks are the future announcing itself.

But the pooka is finally the occasion, not the subject. The novel’s true subject is guilt — the guilt Aiden carries for Martin’s death, the guilt Catherine carried for Sinead’s, the inherited shame that the pooka’s taunts expose and the family’s love cannot quite reach. And the novel’s true movement is from guilt to absolution, from drowning to resurrection: the water that killed Martin is the water from which he returns, a seal become a brother, “smiling and waving.” The ending, with its cracked lenses and its whispered “I am the ghost,” is the novel’s Oedipal recognition: the boy who sought the truth finds that he is the ghost he feared, and that the only revenge worth fearing is the one that turns his own sight back upon himself. The pooka, in the end, is not what haunts Aiden Glencar. Aiden Glencar is what haunts himself — and the novel’s great, tender achievement is to make that recognition the beginning of forgiveness rather than the end of hope.

### Notes on Sources

Quotations are drawn from the manuscript of Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019), with chapter citations supplied inline. The novel’s title and closing poem are from W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child” (1889); the essay also draws on Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Cat and the Moon,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and the epitaph from “Under Ben Bulben,” together with Yeats’s folklore collections Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and The Celtic Twilight (1893) and his essay “Magic” (1901). The epigraph is from Albert Einstein; the closing meditation on time echoes Henry David Thoreau. The folklore background on the púca/pooka — its shapeshifting forms, its association with Samhain and the harvest, its capacity for speech and prophecy, its vengefulness toward those who disturb its dwelling, and the custom of the “pooka’s share” — reflects the standard Irish folkloric tradition as recorded in such collections as Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) and Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), and in modern scholarship on the Irish supernatural (e.g., the work of Patricia Lysaght on the banshee and related death-omens). The account of Achill Island and Keem Bay — the gloss of Acaill as “eagle,” the Clew Bay Drowning of 1894, and the holy well at Kildamhnait — draws on local Achill histories and the island’s tourism and heritage records. The Oedipal reading draws on Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.

Notes on Sources

All Essays Second Sight Against the Celtic Twilight → A Comprehensive Study