Give Them Unquiet Dreams

I. A Novel Built on a Double Inheritance

Give Them Unquiet Dreams asks a fourteen-year-old boy to carry two inheritances at once: a family history of loss stretching back to rural Ireland, and a diagnosis — his mother Laura's psychiatric commitment — imposed by a Boston medical establishment with no interest in that history. The novel's premise sounds, described this way, like a case study; what makes it a novel, and a Kirkus-starred one, is Mulhern's decision to withhold the tools that would let a reader safely resolve the case. Aiden Glencar, the narrator, shares with his mother a family “gift” of second sight — visions, a dead grandfather's nightly visitations, flashes of other people's thoughts — that the novel never confirms or debunks. The reader is asked to hold the same undecidable question the Boston child-welfare and psychiatric systems refuse to hold: is Laura ill, or is she simply the bearer of a perception her culture has no diagnostic category for?

This premise places the novel squarely inside Mulhern's larger project, described in the site's other essays as an insistence that the sacred survives disguised as the ordinary and that inherited trauma persists as a kind of family cosmology rather than a resolved plot event.¹ What distinguishes Unquiet Dreams from the short fiction that shares its methods is scale: it is Mulhern's only long-form treatment of the Glencar-family material, and the additional length lets him build out consequences — institutionalization, family fracture, a child's improvised campaign against an indifferent bureaucracy — that a story's compressed form cannot fully dramatize.

II. Structure: Two Continents, Three Generations

The novel's architecture moves constantly between two geographies and three generations: the rural Irish past of Aiden's great-grandmother Sinead, who dies falling into a well after hearing banshees call to her; the immigrant generation of Catherine, Aiden's grandmother, who carries guilt for her mother's death across the ocean to Boston; and the present-tense 1970s narrative of Aiden and his brother Martin, fighting to bring their mother Laura home from a psychiatric hospital. Companion essays on this site examine in detail how second sight functions as the mechanism that lets these three generations compress into a single first-person narrative without an omniscient frame,² and how Mulhern's Boston bedroom visitations depart from the communal, geographically anchored folk belief recorded in Yeats's The Celtic Twilight.³ What matters for a whole-novel reading is the effect that compression produces: a book in which the past is never background. Sinead's death by the well and Catherine's decades of unspoken guilt are not exposition delivered once and set aside; they recur, retold in different registers by the grandfather's ghost and later by Rita in the Public Garden,⁴ until the reader understands that for this family, no death is ever fully in the past tense. The novel's two-continent structure enacts, at the level of plot geography, the same claim its supernatural apparatus makes at the level of metaphysics: nothing is over.

III. Aiden Glencar and the Ethics of the Gift

Aiden narrates the novel from an adult retrospective vantage, looking back at his fourteen-year-old self, and the gap between those two ages does real work in the book. As a child, Aiden receives instruction from his grandfather's ghost in explicitly practical, almost tactical terms: “If Laura does something that others think peculiar, you must protect her. Make her actions seem rational,” the ghost tells him, adding that the adults around her are afraid “when things don't fit their idea of reality… their vision is limited.”⁵ The instruction converts Aiden from a passive witness of family crisis into an active manager of his mother's public presentation — a fourteen-year-old assigned the job of curating, for a hospital and a court system, what version of his mother's inner life is permitted to be called sane.

The novel is careful not to let this responsibility resolve into heroism without cost. The adult narrator admits, late in the book, that he spent much of his adult life trying to “ignore my second sight, the flashes of intuition, and telepathy,”⁶ a confession that reads simultaneously as proof the gift was real — why suppress an invention? — and as the testimony of someone who has spent decades uncertain whether to trust his own perception, a companion essay on the site's unreliable-narrator readings terms this “the child narrator's unreliability and the adult narrator's unresolved doubt… the same problem restated at two ages.”⁷ The gift, in other words, protects Laura and costs Aiden something the novel never fully quantifies: a lifetime of not knowing whether his own mind can be trusted.

IV. Laura's Diagnosis: Credibility, Gender, and Institutional Power

Underneath its supernatural apparatus, Give Them Unquiet Dreams is a novel about who gets believed. Laura's visions and Aiden's visions are, within the text, the same category of perception, inherited through the same family line — yet only Laura is institutionalized for hers. The distinction the novel draws is not between true sight and false sight, but between a child's private, containable version of the gift and an adult woman's version, which disrupts a marriage, a household, and eventually draws the attention of a medical system built to pathologize exactly the kind of disruption she causes. Martin's flat verdict on his mother — “Aiden, she was acting crazy”⁸ — voices the ordinary, unremarkable modern consensus the novel sets against the Glencar family's inherited belief, and the minor character Margie's late, unprompted observation that “I think she sees things that other people don't”⁸ quietly seeds doubt into that consensus from a source with no stake in defending Laura.

The novel does not resolve this tension by proving Laura sane in a courtroom sense; it resolves it, if it resolves it at all, by making Aiden's protective performance — managing what other people are permitted to see — the actual mechanism of Laura's freedom. That is a bleaker resolution than a conventional redemption plot would offer: Laura is not vindicated by the medical establishment recognizing her gift as real. She is freed because a child successfully stage-manages her presentation until the institution loses interest in scrutinizing her. The novel's quiet suggestion is that this is how belief and credibility actually get distributed inside families and institutions alike — not through truth prevailing, but through someone taking on the exhausting, permanent work of translation between a person's reality and what power is willing to accept as real.

V. Catherine and Sinead: The Well at the Center of the Book

If Laura's crisis is the novel's present-tense engine, Sinead's death by drowning in a well, and Catherine's lifelong guilt over it, is its buried foundation. The grandfather's ghost delivers the story to Aiden in compressed, folkloric terms — “A horse startled her and she fell into a well… before, she heard banshees calling out to her”⁹ — and a companion essay on this site details how that telling and Rita's later, more naturalistic retelling in the Public Garden function as two registers of the same information, one suited to cosmology and one to reckoning.⁹ What deserves emphasis in a whole-novel reading is what the doubled telling implies about guilt's half-life across generations: Catherine carries her mother's death as unspoken guilt for decades, crosses an ocean without resolving it, and dies without fully unburdening herself of it, leaving Aiden — who never met Sinead and was not alive for most of Catherine's guilt — to inherit the obligation of closing the account on her behalf, delivering Catherine's gratitude to Rita only after Catherine herself has died.¹⁰ The novel's argument, made structurally rather than stated outright, is that family guilt does not expire with the generation that incurred it; it is simply handed forward, disguised as inheritance, folklore, or a boy's strange gift, until someone is finally in a position to set it down.

VI. The Pelican and the Sacramental Ordinary

Mulhern's fiction, across the corpus, tends to locate the sacred inside deliberately unglamorous objects and creatures rather than inside conventional religious iconography, and Unquiet Dreams supplies one of the clearest instances of the pattern: a pelican, functioning within the novel's argument as a sacrament administered without a priest, standing alongside a classroom communion scene and a family beach trip elsewhere in Mulhern's work as evidence of the same recurring conviction.¹¹ The choice of a pelican specifically — an awkward, unglamorous bird rather than a dove or any more conventionally sacred creature — is consistent with the novel's larger refusal to let its supernatural material harden into tidy religious allegory. Second sight in this novel is never simply a metaphor for Catholic faith; it survives, like the pelican, as something ungainly and specific, closer to inherited family fact than to doctrine.

VII. Reception and Place in the Corpus

Give Them Unquiet Dreams was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019 and awarded a Kirkus Star, an accolade the publication reserves for books of exceptional merit; Kirkus's own assessment called it “a luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”¹² The novel also won the Readers' Favorite Book Award, was named a Notable Best Indie Book of 2019, and received a Red Ribbon (highly recommended) designation from the UK's Wishing Shelf Book Awards.¹² Within Mulhern's own body of work, a full-length comparative study on this site places the novel at the center of his achievement, describing it as representing “the fullest expression of his literary sensibility” and situating it, alongside Molly Bonamici, in the company of Alice McDermott's lyrical family chronicles, William Kennedy's ghost-haunted Albany fiction, and William Trevor's quiet tragedies of the overlooked.¹³ Selected material from the novel was later adapted into short fiction gathered under Aiden and Laura's shared second sight, extending the Glencar family's reach into Mulhern's story collections as well.¹⁴

VIII. Conclusion: What the Title Means

The novel's title, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, reads, after a full engagement with the book, less like a curse than like an inheritance the Glencar family has decided to accept rather than refuse. A quiet dream would be one undisturbed by the dead, by inherited guilt, or by a perception that will not resolve itself into a diagnosis anyone else can confirm. The Glencars do not get quiet dreams, and by the novel's end, the withholding of that peace reads less as tragedy than as fidelity — to Sinead, to Catherine, to a family history that insists on being felt rather than settled. Aiden's second sight, Laura's visions, and the ghost's nightly visitations are, in the end, the mechanism by which this family refuses to let its dead, or its guilt, or its own reality, go quiet. That refusal is the source of the novel's suffering and, in the same measure, the source of its grace.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Second Sight as Narrative Technology → The Quiet Cartographer