Give Them Unquiet Dreams

I. Two Inheritances

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. Described this way the premise sounds like a case study, but the novel withholds 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 question the hospital and the courts will not hold: is Laura ill, or does she bear a perception her culture has no category for?

The book moves between two geographies and three generations. In the rural Irish past, Aiden’s great-grandmother Sinead dies at a well. Her daughter Catherine, Aiden’s grandmother, carries guilt for that death across the ocean to Boston. In the 1970s present, Aiden and his older brother Martin try to bring their mother home from a psychiatric hospital. None of this history stays in the background. The death at the well is told and retold, in different registers, until the reader understands that for this family no death is ever fully in the past tense. The two-continent structure makes, at the level of plot, the same claim the novel’s supernatural apparatus makes at the level of metaphysics: nothing is over.

The novel opens on exactly that claim, in the narrator’s first sentences: “When I was a child, my grandmother gave me advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Never forget where you came from.’ So I remember my origins. I am borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The last phrase borrows the final cadence of The Great Gatsby, and the borrowing is apt. Aiden is not a man who chooses to remember. He is carried back, against the current, by an instruction he received before he could understand it. The grandmother who gives the advice is no sentimental keeper of the hearth. In the same opening scene she brushes the boy’s hair “until my scalp hurt” and tells him, “You must toughen up, Aiden. Weak people get nowhere in this world.” Love and hardness arrive in the same breath, and that doubleness is the soil from which the rest of the book grows.

The novel is the only long-form treatment of the Glencar family, whose members also appear in the Aiden stories of The Weight of Small Mercies. The length lets Mulhern follow out consequences a story could only point to: institutionalization, a divided family, and a child’s improvised campaign against an indifferent bureaucracy.

II. Second Sight as Narrative Technology

Readers who meet Aiden’s second sight are tempted, reasonably, to read it as theme: an inheritance of Irish folk belief, a figure for difference, a way of keeping grief for the dead close to love for the living. All of these readings are available, and none is wrong. But reading second sight only as theme misses what it does as craft. Any first-person coming-of-age novel faces the same problem: how does a single consciousness, bound to one time and place, gain access to what it could not know—events before its birth, other people’s thoughts, outcomes still to come—without breaking its own point of view? Second sight is this novel’s answer. It is a license, written into the rules of the book’s world, that supports foreshadowing, compresses decades of family history into scenes a child can plausibly witness, and loosens the boundary between past, present, and future that strict realism would have to respect.

Unusually for a literary novel, a character states the book’s logic of time outright. Aiden’s grandfather, appearing as a ghost at the foot of the boy’s bed, produces an image: “Look at this block of wood . . . The front represents the future; the middle is the present; and the back part . . . is the past.” When Aiden asks what this means, the grandfather explains: “That’s life. Eternity. There is no division between the past, present, and future; there is rather a single existence. Our brains can’t handle everything happening at once.” And he makes the consequence explicit: “your consciousness is like a small flashlight that can only shine on one part of the block at a time.” This is close to the philosophical view sometimes called eternalism, in which every moment is equally real and a mind able to survey the whole block would have no privileged “now.”

The speech works as an operating rule. Once a reader accepts that the grandfather—and Aiden and Laura, who share “the gift”—can shine that flashlight where an ordinary consciousness cannot reach, the novel can move between the Irish backstory and the Boston present without a framing device, an omniscient narrator, or a structural break. The grandfather’s nightly visits become a means of compression: a few pages of dialogue at a child’s bedside deliver what would otherwise take chapters of backstory.

The same license lets the novel foreshadow without cheating. The risk of any foreshadowing device is that it can feel like the author arranging dominoes. Here the foreshadowing happens to Aiden inside the story. When he asks his grandfather about a “blond lady” he has glimpsed at school, the answer comes in the novel’s own supernatural vocabulary: “We call her a shimmerer. A good soul who has passed. Before she completes her journey, she has something she wants to accomplish.” Aiden connects her to a classmate: “Hope Gallagher?” “Yes, son.” “Why does she need to watch over her?” “You’ll find out.” The scene plants a detail that will matter later without the narrator signalling that he knows it will, because the gift gives Aiden only fragments. And it turns an authorial technique, the deferred revelation, into a trait of character: a ghost who teaches by riddle, in the manner of the old Irish storyteller. The device recurs. Aiden sees “a girl . . . wearing a green pinafore, her scarf caught on a branch” long before the image is explained, and Laura draws her “ghost man” obsessively, chapters before the reader learns who he is.

Second sight also complicates the narrating voice. Aiden tells the story as an adult looking back at his fourteen-year-old self, and the gap between the two ages does real work. As a boy he receives practical, almost tactical instruction from the ghost: “If Laura does something that others think peculiar, you must protect her. Make her actions seem rational.” The adults around her, the grandfather says, are afraid “when things don’t fit their idea of reality . . . their vision is limited.” The instruction turns Aiden from a witness of his family’s crisis into the manager of his mother’s public presentation, a child assigned to curate which version of her inner life a hospital and a court will be allowed to call sane.

The result is a particular kind of unreliable narration. Aiden does not conceal what he knows; he reports perceptions that cannot, by their nature, be judged true or false from inside the text. He describes his grandfather’s visits and his own visions with the same declarative confidence he brings to everything else, and the prose never marks them as dream or delusion. The novel stages the problem in the plot. “Maybe those visions she was having were true?” Aiden asks his brother, and Martin answers, “Aiden, she was acting crazy.” Even the adult narrator does not settle it. He admits that he later “tried to ignore my second sight, the flashes of intuition, and telepathy,” which reads both as proof that the gift was real and as the account of a man who has spent his life unsure whether to trust what he sees. The child’s unreliability and the adult’s doubt are one problem stated at two ages.

III. Diagnosed and Believed

Underneath its supernatural apparatus, Give Them Unquiet Dreams is a novel about who gets believed. Laura’s visions and Aiden’s are, within the text, the same kind of perception, inherited through the same family line, yet only Laura is committed for hers. The distinction the novel draws is not between true sight and false sight. It is between a child’s private, containable version of the gift and a woman’s version, which disrupts a marriage and a household and draws the attention of a medical system built to treat exactly that kind of disruption as illness. Martin’s flat verdict, “Aiden, she was acting crazy,” voices the ordinary modern consensus. A minor character, Margie, who has no reason to defend Laura, unsettles it: “I think she sees things that other people don’t.”

The hospital matters to the argument. McCall Hospital recurs across Mulhern’s fiction with the persistence of a remembered place—described in nearly the same language in “Arise and Go Now,” “Blindfolded,” and the novel, always approached by “winding up a slope of lawn to a sandstone Admissions building,” always flanked by “brick edifices with classical flourishes, such as gabled roofs, Roman columns, and ivy-covered walls,” always holding “approximately twenty-five patients, all with a variety of illnesses: schizophrenia, mania, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and borderline personality.” The consistency is itself a kind of statement. This is not scenery invented once and forgotten but a fixed point in the fiction’s geography, returned to with the fidelity of memory.

So does the hospital’s language. Laura has been committed on the strength of “her claim that she heard the voices of dead people and her frequent ‘visions of past and future events,’” a formulation that leads “to a diagnosis of schizophrenia.” The passive, official cadence is worth pausing over. A fourteen-year-old does not naturally think in the syntax of intake forms; the boy has absorbed it from adults and paperwork. The prose shows, without comment, how institutional language enters even a child’s private account of his mother, so that “she saw ghosts” has become “her claim . . . led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia” before the reader arrives. The nursing staff are drawn with a gentle satirical edge that separates competence from understanding. Nurse Nancy, new and eager, “want[ing] to do things right,” is outmaneuvered again and again by Catherine’s command of the ward (“We know how to get there, Nancy Nurse. . . . Your time would be better spent memorizing that board”). She knows the policy. She does not know Laura.

The novel’s central move is to give one set of facts—visions, speech with the dead, foreknowledge—two descriptions and let both stand. In “Blindfolded,” within a single scene, Laura’s condition is described first in the institution’s vocabulary—“My mother’s claim of hearing the voices of dead people and her ‘visions’ led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My grandmother and father had her declared mentally incompetent”—and then, a few sentences later, in the family’s, as the dead grandfather offers his counter-diagnosis: “Second sight is something that has been in your family for years. Your grandmother’s mother possessed it, and she, too, was demonized. . . . There are always people who are blind to the gifts in others.” No narrator steps in to say which account is true. What tips the balance, scene after scene, is small circumstantial evidence that keeps arriving on the family’s side. Aiden reports a private detail of his grandfather’s death that only Catherine could otherwise know: “He said you should stop blaming yourself for leaving him in the chair that night when you went to bed. It’s not your fault that he choked on his vomit.” Catherine is shocked, not skeptical—“Nanna’s face quivered and she put her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Where in God’s name did you hear that expression?’”—the reaction of someone facing evidence, not humoring a child.

What separates this from ambiguous magical realism is how closely belief is tied to power. Laura, a single mother with no income of her own and a court-appointed guardian, has her visions turned into a diagnosis that strips her of legal authority over her children. Aiden, a boy under the protection of a resourceful grandmother, has visions of the same kind—the grandfather traces both to the same family line—and no one proposes committing him. His grandmother’s response moves from suspicion toward something close to awe: “Where did you learn these things?” The question “is this person psychic or psychotic?” becomes inseparable from another question: who has the standing to be believed?

The men of the family voice disbelief, and the novel makes that disbelief look convenient. Aiden’s father puts the rationalist case bluntly—“There are no ghosts, Aiden. . . . We shouldn’t have released her from McCall’s. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness.”—in the same conversation in which he announces that he is leaving for Arizona and a new relationship. The novel grants him a coherent worldview but sets his disbelief in his wife’s visions beside his abandonment of her care, and lets the reader draw the connection. Catherine is the more interesting case, because her belief is earned slowly and against her own resistance. Her first response to Aiden is the same minimizing vocabulary the hospital uses on Laura: “Aiden, lots of people have dreams about people they’ve lost.” But she has something at stake that the father lacks: she loved her husband, she carries guilt over his death, and Aiden’s testimony offers absolution. By the end she has moved from “Stop with your malarkey. Ghosts don’t exist” to an unguarded moment of shared sight on the hospital lawn: “Before getting into the car, both my mother and I saw him. My grandfather was sitting on the grass beneath a tree.” The sentence makes Laura—the diagnosed, disbelieved woman—a co-witness whose perception is, for one moment, simply true.

None of this is a simple inversion in which psychiatry is wrong and folk belief right. The novel is just as attentive to what the gift costs. The story of Aiden’s great-grandmother, told by the ghost, is the clearest statement of what happens to a visionary woman with no one to believe her: “Once, she was joyful, envisioning life’s possibilities, but slowly she withdrew, hurt by the malice of others. . . . She dropped dead while lifting a bucket from a well. Tumbled right over the stonewall she did.” The grandfather refuses easy comfort: “Yes, Aiden. But what good did it do the poor woman. Dead she was. . . . Aiden, most people are afraid to believe in things they cannot see. It frightens them and they become nasty.” What determines each seer’s fate is not the accuracy of what she sees but the protection she has. A visionary boy with a devoted, if larcenous, grandmother and a loyal brother—“If you say Grandpa fuckin’ visits you, then Grandpa fuckin’ visits you”—survives. A visionary woman without that protection is medicated and confined. Her grandmother, with even less, dies alone at a well.

The novel does not resolve the tension by proving Laura sane. She is freed, in the end, because her son learns to stage-manage her presentation until the institution loses interest in scrutinizing her. That is a bleaker resolution than a conventional redemption plot would offer, and a more honest one about how credibility is actually distributed in families and institutions: not by truth prevailing, but by someone taking on the exhausting, permanent work of translating between a person’s reality and what power is willing to accept as real. The narration has a limit here, and it should be named. Aiden is always predisposed to believe; the reader is never given a clinician’s case from the inside. A reader who trusts psychiatry will find the deck more subtly stacked than a reader inclined the other way. But the limit is consistent with the novel’s larger restraint. Just as it declines to decide whether its grandmothers are thieves or saints, it declines to decide, from any position outside the family, whether second sight is real. It shows what the question costs, and who pays.

IV. The Pooka and the Poem

If the question of belief drives the novel in the present, its plot runs on Irish folklore. The púca (anglicized “pooka”) is one of the most changeable figures in the Irish supernatural repertoire: a solitary spirit that takes animal form—most often a black horse, but also a goat, a cat, an eagle, or a human with telltale animal features. In folk tradition it is a trickster, capricious more than cruel, bound to the turning points of the year, especially Samhain. Two of its traits matter here. It speaks, and its speech is understood as riddling prophecy. And it takes revenge: folk accounts tie its malice to a specific grievance—a field plowed, a well fouled, a dwelling disturbed—after which it may harry a family for generations.

The novel plants both traits in a single speech, the grandfather’s warning in Chapter Two about the old woman who has been tormenting Aiden on the bus:

“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.”

Everything that follows is prefigured here: the revenge, its reach across generations, the catalogue of animal forms, and the “veiled messages.” What the grandfather does not say is why the pooka has come for this family. The old woman answers that herself in Chapter Four. She names herself “Moira le Fay”—Moira for the Greek Moirai, the Fates, and le Fay for Morgan le Fay, the shapeshifting enchantress of Arthurian legend; fate and fairy in one name—and she states the grievance: “But I’ve known ya family for generations. Your kin disturbed my well and stole my berries. You make me sick.”

The full weight of that grievance arrives only in Chapter Fourteen, when Rita tells Aiden in the Boston Public Garden how his great-grandmother died:

“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.”

The reader has heard this death before, and the doubling is deliberate. The grandfather tells it first in Chapter Two, compressed and folkloric—“A horse startled her and she fell into a well . . . before, she heard banshees calling out to her”—because his visit must also lay down the rules of the novel’s world. Rita tells it again, naturalistically and at length, in a scene whose purpose is reckoning. The same event serves two different jobs, and only the second carries its emotional cost. That cost is guilt. “From that day forward, Catherine blamed herself,” and the grandmother carries a “restless feeling of guilt” across an ocean and a lifetime for a death that was not her fault. 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 what is coming for him. Guilt, the novel suggests, does not expire with the generation that incurred it. It is handed forward, disguised as folklore or a boy’s strange gift, until someone is in a position to set it down; it falls to Aiden, who never met Sinead, to carry Catherine’s gratitude to Rita after Catherine has died.

The grandfather’s catalogue—“a cat, a goat, a horse, even an eagle”—works as an index the plot then works through, so that the pooka is felt even in passages that read as ordinary realism. It appears first as the old woman on the bus, with “milky” gray eyes and sulfur on her breath, whispering the slur Aiden most fears: “You little faggot.” At Aunt Clara’s, when Aiden slams a car door on her hand, “A finger dropped on the rug. I ground my sneaker on it until it was a pile of dust,” and her taunts are omens the novel will keep: “Your brother won’t always be ‘round to protect ya.” Later she whispers in a moving car, “Maybe you’ll be locked up in a looney bin like your ma,” aiming at the precise wound—Aiden’s fear of being diagnosed for the gift he shares with his mother. At a school dance, when Aiden finally turns on her and “banged her head against a steel cross,” “Her body collapsed into a heap of white ashes”; Martin, seeing only snow, asks why his brother was “screaming at the wall.” The eagle appears obliquely, in the story of Nell, a patient who “thought an eagle was chasing me down the hall” and, swinging a broom at the phantom, drove a splinter into her own eye. On the flight to Ireland a black cat “with golden eyes,” named Minnaloushe after Yeats’s cat in “The Cat and the Moon,” “jumped across the aisle, bit me, and scratched my arms.” On Achill, “A large goat charged my mother,” then stood on a ledge with “the rectangular black pupils of his golden eyes . . . fixed on us,” until a farm boy drove it off with a curse, “Mallach De’ ort!” And the catalogue completes itself in the novel’s starkest 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?”

That last scene also pays off the “veiled messages.” During a failed attempt to free Laura from the hospital, a phantom roommate sings behind a curtain—“Raindrops keep falling on my head. Ooh aah.”—a woman Laura insists “never had a roommate.” The song returns on the plane to Ireland, sung by the cat’s owner. And at the canyon Laura dies during “a sudden rainstorm” at a place called Ooh Aah Point. Aiden supplies the reading the reader has been dreading: “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.” The nonsense syllables were the name of the place all along. Here prophecy drives the plot. The pooka threatens and also announces, and the suspense comes from slowly realizing that each taunt is a hinge the future will turn on.

Over the folklore lies a poem. The title comes from Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” (1889), which is printed in full at the novel’s close, so that the last words a reader meets are

Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

The poem’s faeries steal a child away to the water; the novel is the story of what was taken from this family. Even the family name comes from the poem’s third stanza—“Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car”—and in Ireland Mrs. O’Malley half-remembers it: “Something about a magical place called Glencar in County Sligo . . . I know there was Glencar somewhere in the verse.” Other Yeats poems run through the book. The grandmother’s photograph album records “Our Trip to Innisfree,” with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” copied into it (“I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore”), and Rita recites “The Wild Swans at Coole” in the Public Garden, ending on its question about waking “some day / To find they have flown away.” The grandmother is from County Sligo, Yeats’s own country, and the pooka’s grievance—the disturbed well, the stolen berries—belongs to the landscape where Yeats gathered the stories of The Celtic Twilight (1893).

The Yeatsian frame is biographical as well as allusive. Yeats was the great collector of the folklore the novel draws on. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and The Celtic Twilight (1893) gathered the Sligo stories of faeries, púcas, second sight, and the dead, and Sligo was his mother’s country, the home of the Pollexfens, where he spent the summers of his childhood and first heard the tales he would spend his life defending. In “Magic” (1901) he went further than a collector needs to go and set down, as belief, “That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy,” and that “our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.” The novel never cites the essay, but its supernatural traffic reads like that doctrine turned into plot: a boy who catches other people’s thoughts, a grandfather who visits from the dead, a mother who draws a face she has not yet seen. And the title’s own faeries supply the method. In the poem they “seek for slumbering trout / And whispering in their ears / Give them unquiet dreams”; in the novel the pooka gives Aiden his by whispering the future.

Yeats’s later poems offer one more way to read the ending. The man who closes the novel, Aiden grown “gray-haired,” teaching “The Dead” in a cold Boston classroom and “gazing at adolescent faces,” and at last recognized as the “old man with glasses” of his mother’s drawing, can be set beside the aged speaker of “Sailing to Byzantium”—“An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick”—who asks to be gathered “into the artifice of eternity,” and beside the old man among the young in “Among School Children,” wondering what he has become. Yeats’s epitaph, too, finds an echo in the novel’s horses: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” The “dark horse with golden eyes” at Sinead’s well and the horse that bolts at Ooh Aah Point are the pooka in its most classic shape, passing through the family’s generations cold-eyed and taking what it holds it is owed.

Second sight against the Celtic Twilight

Setting the novel beside Yeats’s Sligo collecting helps show what it inherits and what it changes. Yeats’s stance was famously double: he wanted to preserve peasant belief as a record and also, at moments, to affirm it—“No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries,” he writes, a line that never says whether it reports a superstition or confesses one. The novel’s grandfather has a similar hedge: “I haven’t ruled out the possibility of ghosts or second sight. But believing those things makes life too complicated.” Much of the novel’s taxonomy is recognizably traditional. The banshee warns of death and does no harm herself, heard by a household the night before a death: “On the night before, she heard banshees calling out to her. What’s a banshee? A type of fairy or spirit . . . And there were three knocks on the door, which means someone is going to die.” And second sight is not the novel’s invention but a widely attested folk category, which Yeats met in his own family—his cousin Lucy Middleton at Rosses Point was said to have it. As in many folk accounts, the gift in the novel passes through named female relatives and brings its bearers suspicion, not admiration: “Your grandmother’s ma had the gift, and she, too, was demonized.” To Aiden it is “a curse, a burden.”

The differences are as telling. Yeats’s fairy world belongs to a landscape—raths, fairy forts, particular fields near Sligo—and to communities that share and argue over their sightings. The novel moves the inheritance to Irish-American Boston, where it survives inside one family’s bedroom with no landscape to anchor it and no village to confirm it. The fairy fort is replaced by a psychiatric hospital, the village’s shared belief by a diagnosis. And the grandfather’s block-of-wood speech, in which all of time exists “all at once,” has no clear counterpart in Yeats’s folklore; it is closer to modern philosophy, or to the visionary system Yeats later built in A Vision. The novel brings a metaphysics of time to folk materials and gives one family a framework for prophecy, ghosts, and inherited guilt. What was once a public cosmology has narrowed to a single bedroom, a single ghost, and a single boy who believes.

Yeats could report that “there are some doubters even in the western villages”; the novel’s Boston begins from doubt. Belief there is the exception that must defend itself, and the family’s inherited faith stands isolated and stigmatized. The taxonomy of the uncanny has moved from a communal world, where such claims are argued in good faith, into a clinical one with firm institutional ideas about what counts as real.

The novel’s pooka departs from tradition most of all. The folk púca plays pranks, leads travelers on wild night rides, and spoils the blackberries after Samhain; farmers leave it “the pooka’s share” of the harvest, and in many tales it is outwitted or simply wanders off. This pooka is a relentless avenger bound to one family’s grievance, fused with figures the tradition never joined to it—the Fates, Morgan le Fay, the banshee’s omen—and its riddles are death sentences. It is never outwitted. And it is, finally, theological: its cruelty exposes the guilt Aiden has spent his life refusing to look at, and so becomes, against its own malice, the occasion of the forgiveness the novel ends on.

The departure is the measure of what the novel does with its source. Where the folk púca is outwitted or simply wanders off, this one completes its work: it claims Laura at the canyon, closing the arc that opened with Sinead at the well. And it is reframed in distinctly Catholic terms, as the adversary who, by grace, becomes the occasion of salvation. The tales of the púca do not ask it to carry that weight. Here the folk creature carries both a Christian tragedy and an Oedipal one.

V. Martin: The Brother Who Came Back

That guilt has a precise origin. Martin is the family’s swimmer—“His friends called him Seal because of his agility in the water”—and Aiden “swam badly.” At Nantasket, Aiden follows his brother into the surf and is caught in a riptide, and the pooka is present even here, in its horse form:

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 towards 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.”

The Yeats refrain sounds at the moment of death, and the faeries of the poem claim a child, though not the one they were reaching for. “Martin was about ten feet away and then he disappeared.” The children’s voices finish the poem: “Away with us he’s going.” Aiden is pulled out by a lifeguard. “Two days later, Martin’s body washed up.”

Nothing in those sentences is religious in vocabulary, and the flatness is deliberate. A writer who wanted a parallel noticed could have reached for sacrificial language. This one gives only the direction of a swimmer and the distance at which he vanished. Yet the structure is the Gospel’s definition of love: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Martin does more than die near his brother. He dies because he swam toward him, so that Aiden’s survival and Martin’s loss are one event seen from two sides.

That substitution organizes the rest of Aiden’s life. “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.” The guilt explains the decades that follow—the depression, the suppressed gift, the solitude—and it is inherited: what Catherine felt at the well, Aiden feels at the sea. It has a second, quieter source in shame. Aiden’s fear of his own sexuality, “my shame about being gay,” is the wound the pooka’s first taunt exploited, and it feeds his conviction that he was the wrong son, the one who should have drowned.

Readers of the novel tend to call Martin a Christ figure, and the instinct is sound, but the novel never says so, and the reading has to be earned. The fairest description is a precise and limited one: the novel gives Martin the actions of Christ, in the Gospel’s order, while withholding the character of Christ and never certifying that any of those actions really happened.

The death supplies the pattern; an emblem supplies the sign. The pelican pins are Martin’s, brought home from a visit, and the novel stops to explain them in his presence: “A pelican is a symbol of Jesus. Aunt Clarise said a mother pelican will wound herself, striking her breast with her beak to feed the babies with her blood.” This is the medieval pelican in her piety, carved over church doors and set into hymns as an image of the Passion and the Eucharist—and, as so often with this writer, the sacred arrives in an awkward, unglamorous bird and not a dove. The emblem returns. In Chapter Three the grandmother hears a cry—“It’s the sound of a pelican. A symbol of Christ”—and “crossed herself as in church.” And as Aiden and his mother carry Martin’s ashes to Keem Bay, “A flock of brown-gray pelicans flew toward the shore.” The novel never comments on the return; it places the emblem over the dead brother and moves on.

Then come the appearances. The Gospels do not end with a burial but with the risen Christ coming, being recognized, acting, and going. Martin’s visits keep that sequence. On an icy Boston curb, Aiden falls, his glasses fly off, and a voice says, “I got you.” Then: “He put his arms under my chest and lifted me.” Through cracked lenses Aiden recognizes his brother, who says, “I told you I would always have your back,” and a line later, “He was gone.” Recognition and disappearance arrive together, as at Emmaus, where the disciples’ “eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31). The promise was made in life—in Chapter Ten Aiden recalls it, “‘I will always have your back’”—and the dead brother returns to keep it in the same words.

At Keem Bay, waist-deep in the water, Aiden and his mother pray, and the order of what follows matters: “I began the Our Father and she joined me. At the end, I heard myself say, ‘Martin, please forgive me.’” The Lord’s Prayer asks the Father to forgive our trespasses; Aiden finishes it and addresses the same petition to his brother, so that in the grammar of the sentence Martin stands where forgiveness is prayed to. His mother answers first—“It wasn’t your fault, Aiden”—but the answer that closes the question comes later, from Martin himself.

The last visitation joins healing to absolution. Aiden is sick and wakes in the night to find his brother there: “He had placed his palm against my sore chest.” The next sentence is clinical: “When I woke, my fever was gone.” A touch, a fever that leaves, a sufferer who rises: that is the order of one of the earliest healings in Matthew, “And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them” (Matthew 8:15). And at that bedside Martin speaks his last words in the novel:

“Go to sleep, brother. It wasn’t your fault. I never left you and I never will.”

The placement recalls the end of Matthew’s Gospel, where the risen Christ’s final words promise presence across all time to come: “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). The wording sits closer to another promise, Hebrews 13:5: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” Martin quotes neither. His sentence fuses Matthew’s position with Hebrews’ phrasing, so that the last words of the returned brother fall where the Gospel puts its last words, in language Scripture uses for God’s faithfulness.

The sentence also does something no verse does: it reaches backward. “I never left you” covers the years since the drowning, which Aiden lived as abandonment; “and I never will” covers everything after. It does not undo the drowning, the guilt, or the decades they shaped. It changes what those years mean. The past, read for a lifetime as proof of abandonment, is reread as the site of a hidden fidelity. This is the novel’s deepest kind of resurrection, and it belongs to art more than doctrine. The loss stays, and is raised into another meaning. Consolation can soothe without transforming; this sentence leaves the history exactly as it was and alters what the history says.

A reading worth holding has to survive the evidence against it, and the novel supplies that evidence generously. Martin is not meek. His defense of his brother in the school gym is a beating—“Out of nowhere, Martin appeared. He ran up to the kid and smacked him in the face,” followed by “You mess with my brother again and I’ll beat the living shit out of you!”—and the grandmother, reporting a neighbor’s reproach, dismisses “that shite about Jesus and the other cheek.” He mocks his own emblem: “Imagine if we worshiped a pelican nailed to the cross,” and, a moment later, “How ‘bout a roast pelican.” His death is framed by folklore, not the Church: he is taken, in the novel’s own imagery, by Yeats’s faery host. There is no empty tomb; his body washes up and his ashes are scattered. And every return carries its own doubt. After the curb: “The fever was causing hallucinations, I thought.” After the bedside: “Had I dreamt that Martin visited me? Had I hallucinated because I was sick?”

These objections do not dissolve the pattern; they define it. Martin is not an allegorical Christ who borrows the Redeemer’s virtues. He is a profane, funny, violent teenage brother to whom the novel gives the actions of Christ in their Gospel order: he gives his life, carries the emblem of the Passion, returns, lifts the fallen, absolves, heals, and promises to remain. Two things make the reading persuasive. One is sequence: any single parallel could be coincidence, but not seven in the Gospel’s order. The other is withholding. Elsewhere the novel cites Scripture openly—the drawings on Aiden’s table carry Ecclesiastes, Romans, and Mark by chapter and verse—but the Gospel echoes around Martin carry no citation at all. The novel marks its Scripture everywhere except where its emotional climax falls, and there it trusts the reader to hear the echo unaided.

The novel’s own answer to whether the visits were real is the one Aiden gives the morning after the fever breaks: “It didn’t matter.” That is not indifference. Martin’s significance does not depend on proving that a dead boy came back. It depends on the fact that a brother who had lived with guilt since the riptide was lifted, absolved, healed, and promised company, and that the only shape the novel has for such a gift is the shape of the Gospel. The author has described the intention in terms that fit this reading closely: “I intended all the evidence and subtextual biblical allusions in Martin’s actions and depictions. They indeed were purposeful. But on the other hand he was simply a loving brother. I do not proselytize.” Each half confirms half of the pattern traced here: the Gospel sequence was built, and the boy who swears, fights, and laughs at the pelican pins is what the figure requires, not a flaw in it. Martin is deliberately shaped like Christ and is also simply a loving brother, and neither description cancels the other.

VI. Water, Time, and the Other Room

Water is the novel’s central element, and it carries a double meaning, death and rebirth, drawn from the Catholic imagination. The well is the site of the original wrong; the ocean at Nantasket is the site of the sacrifice; the sea at Keem Bay is the site of the 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”—while the family’s grace is always figured as immersion. Even the novel’s figure for time is a river: “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.”

The return happens on Achill, the grandfather’s homeland—“At last we would visit my grandfather’s homeland and scatter Martin’s ashes in the sea”—which the novel describes as “the edge of the world—the ocean, scattered boulders, rocky cliffs, riotous waves, and a horizon that overpowered.” It is the kind of threshold that Irish tradition calls a thin place, and the island’s history doubles the novel’s imagery: a graveyard at Kildamhnait remembers the Clew Bay Drowning of 1894, and a holy well stands just outside it, water as death and water as grace on the same ground. The island’s Irish name, Acaill—recorded as Eccuill in the annals for 1235—has long been glossed locally as “Eagle Island,” one of the pooka’s own forms, though place-name scholars treat its meaning as uncertain. At Keem Bay, as Aiden and his mother scatter the ashes—“Martin became part of the ocean”—a seal appears:

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.

The seal is Martin’s own nickname, so the animal reveals him. The pooka puts on cat, goat, horse, and eagle in order to harm; Martin returns in his namesake animal, “smiling and waving,” to tell them he is happy. The two transformations are the novel’s moral poles, the dark parody and the true shape, and the word that fits the second is the Christian one, transfiguration, claimed here for the return of an ordinary brother from the sea.

The geography carries the theology. Keem Bay is a horseshoe of sand at the head of a valley between the cliffs of Benmore and the slopes of Croaghaun, an enclosed place cupped against the Atlantic where the dead can come back. The pilgrimage to Achill is a return to the source, the ground where the family’s Irish story and the pooka’s grievance began, and it closes the circle that opened at the well. The novel’s map divides as its faith does. Ireland is the place of the supernatural, the return, and the resurrection; America, where Laura dies at the Grand Canyon, is the place of exile and loss. The family that left Ireland for Boston must go back to be made whole.

Behind the water imagery lies the novel’s metaphysics. The grandfather’s block of time—“a single existence”—and the Einstein epigraph, “The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” join a Christian hope to a physicist’s picture of time. 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.” The pooka, which moves freely across forms and brings the future into the present, is the dark face of the same collapse of time. Its cruelty, in the end, drives Aiden toward the consolation the novel offers.

VII. “I Am the Ghost”

Running beneath the pooka and the guilt is the novel’s most persistent theme, the inversion of sight and blindness: those the world calls mad are the ones who see, and those it calls sane are blind. The grandfather names it when Aiden asks why he sees ghosts: “Many are blind, but you have the gift of sight.” He quotes Einstein to say what kind of blindness he means—“Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed”—and gives the boy an instruction: “Keep your eyes open. Life is more mysterious than you could ever imagine.” Blindness in this book is rarely literal. It is the absence of wonder; it is the rational eye that cannot admit what it sees, as when Martin sees only “snow,” Rita sees only “a wild horse on its way home,” and Laura insists she “never had a roommate”; and above all it is denial. Aiden has refused for decades 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.” On the back of one of them she has written Mark 8:18: “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”

The theme works on several levels, each a different way of seeing or failing to see. Sight is knowledge: the verse from Mark is a question about understanding, not eyesight. Sight is wonder: the grandfather’s Einstein names the deadness of those who have stopped marveling. Sight is love, and love clouds it: a psychic warns that “reading loved ones is difficult because our emotional ties get in the way.” Sight is prophecy: the pooka’s “veiled messages” are the future seen whole. The pooka is the emblem of the inversion. Its eyes are “milky,” the look of blindness, yet it is the one creature in the book that sees the future entire, and the cost of glimpsing it is written in Nell, who saw its eagle form and lost an eye to the splinter of her own broom. Laura’s drawings are the theme’s deepest image. The “mad” woman drew what her second sight showed her, and what she drew was the truth—the ghost, the future, her son grown old. Her madness was a seeing the family could not bear to look at.

Aiden, before the ending, had tried to blind himself—“I completely suppressed my visions and intuitions”—refusing the gift the way the world had refused his mother’s. The two blindings are one exchange. The mother who saw too much was blinded by the world, medicated and confined; the son who refused to see will be blinded by the truth.

The ending is built on that refusal, and its shape is Oedipal. Oedipus pursues the killer of Laius and discovers that the man he seeks is himself. Aiden pursues the “ghost” his mother drew, the apparition he holds responsible for everything—“her stay in the psychiatric facility, my parents’ divorce, the separation of Martin and me.” “The ghost was the focus of all my anger. I blamed him for everything bad that had happened.” 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.

Aristotle, who took this play as his finest example, has a name for the moment: anagnorisis, the recognition in which ignorance turns to knowledge and the hero sees what he has been. In Oedipus Rex it is so unbearable that the king puts out his own eyes; here it arrives as cracked glasses and a sentence in a mother’s hand. It carries the same reversal of blame. The boy who set out to prove his mother sane learns that his own face was the apparition whose appearance sent her to the institution, and the curse he held responsible for everything was never outside him.

The recognition inverts the whole quest. The ghost that haunted the family was Aiden himself—his future self, seen across the collapse of time by his mother’s second sight. The boy who blamed the ghost for everything has been blaming himself. Like Oedipus, the seeker is the object of the search, and the recognition comes with a blinding: on the ice his glasses fly off, “Through the cracked lenses, I saw Martin.” The cracked lenses gather a chain of eye-images that has run through the whole book—the grandfather’s “eyes are dimmed,” Nell’s injured eye, the pooka’s own “milky” gaze—and they pay it off. To see truly, Aiden must first lose his ordinary sight. His mother paid for her seeing with her freedom; he pays with his. In both, the blinding is the condition of the sight.

The mother stands, as in Sophocles, at the center of the tragedy—Oedipus’s fate is bound to Jocasta, who hangs herself, and Aiden’s to Laura, who falls into the canyon—and the oracle is fulfilled through every attempt to outrun it: the flight to Ireland, the pilgrimage with Martin’s ashes, Laura’s hopeful trip west, all turn out to be steps toward Ooh Aah Point. But the ending is not Sophoclean despair. Where Oedipus is left blind and exiled, Aiden is granted a vision of the dead “in that room just beyond the doorway,” Martin talking with their grandfather, the father with the mother, “a line of people . . . back to the moment of Creation.” The broken lenses are a wound and also a correction: they break the illusion that the dead are gone, and the guilt that kept him from them. The arc the novel completes is the Catholic one from denial through confession to absolution—the denial of Peter, healed not by doctrine but by love when the risen Christ asks him three times, “lovest thou me?” (John 21:15–17)—here carried out by a mother’s drawing and a brother’s whisper. “Aiden, it’s time to forgive yourself.” The pooka’s revenge, in its last turn, becomes the occasion of grace.

VIII. Three Traditions, One Story

What makes the novel more than a ghost story is the way it braids three traditions—Irish Catholicism, Irish folklore, and Greek myth—into one account of guilt, sacrifice, and resurrection. Each has been traced separately above. Read together, they turn out to be telling the same story.

The Catholic thread supplies the pattern of sacrifice and return: the brother who lays down his life, the pelican, the appearances, the absolution. The folk thread supplies the agent: a púca with a grievance, a banshee’s cry, a well that was fouled. The Greek thread supplies the shape of fate. Moira le Fay carries the Moirai in her name, the three who spin, measure, and cut the thread of a life, and her “veiled messages” work as an oracle’s riddles work: they are understood only once they are fulfilled, and they are fulfilled through the very efforts made to escape them. The ending is Oedipal in its structure—the seeker who is the object of his search, the blinding that comes with recognition, the mother at the center of the tragedy.

The three systems do not compete; they converge. Fate in the Greek sense would leave Aiden where it leaves Oedipus, blind and exiled. Folklore alone would leave him with a curse and a well. The Catholic frame turns both toward grace, so that the oracle’s fulfillment and the pooka’s revenge become the means by which a hidden guilt is exposed and forgiven. The riddle belongs to Delphi and Thebes, the shape-changer to Sligo, and transfiguration, the word the seal at Keem Bay earns, to the Gospels. A wrong done, a price paid, a truth revealed, a love that outlasts death: each tradition tells part of that sequence, and the novel lets one family’s story pass through all three without choosing among them.

IX. Within the Irish-American Tradition

These techniques belong to a long Irish-American and Irish-diasporic tradition concerned with the transmission of memory and the management of silence, and three bodies of scholarship help place them. Beth O’Leary Anish’s dissertation Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora (University of Rhode Island, 2017), developed alongside her book Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK, argues that the Irish-American story is told “about a partly remembered and partly imagined homeland,” in which “symbol has replaced substance,” and that emigration left a state she calls “collective aphasia”—“a failure to narrate how families moved from being Irish to being American.” The Glencars are a fictional instance of that condition: a family separated from its origin by a well and an ocean, whose story survives in fragments handed down as folklore and guilt.

Anish also draws on accounts of inherited trauma—Cathy Caruth’s belated trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory,” Gabriele Schwab’s children as readers of silence—to show that trauma passes “not only through explicit stories but through silences, withheld information, moods, habits.” Michael McAteer’s collection Silence in Modern Irish Literature (2017) treats silence as something active. Aiden reads his family’s grief through just such unwilled channels: a grandmother’s “restless feeling of guilt,” a mother’s visions, a dead man’s visits. Christopher Cusack’s work on Famine memory offers a useful caution, that the old claim of “a deep-rooted silence in Irish literature” about the Famine “is now seldom repeated” without qualification; the novel’s silences should not be reduced to a single historical cause.

The folding of past into present can be read, too, beside a contemporary example. Juan José Martín González reads Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013) as a “polytemporal” novel whose image of “the taut elastic of time” presents past events as “dynamically connected with present and future orientations.” Where McCann spreads two continents across separate story-threads, this much smaller novel keeps two continents and three generations inside the consciousness of one seer. Kirkus called the result “a luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit,” and Alice McDermott’s family chronicles, William Kennedy’s ghost-haunted Albany, and William Trevor’s overlooked lives offer further points of reference—writers for whom the dead do not stay buried. The likeness is one of method. Nobody is claiming influence. Irish-American fiction keeps solving the problem this novel solves—making uninterrogated history legible in the present—with the same devices: the doubled generation, the object that holds a history, the withheld story, the thin border between the living and the dead. What is distinctive here is how literally the devices are taken. The object that holds a history becomes a living ghost; the withheld story becomes a narration that itself withholds; and the thin border drives the plot, in the form of a shapeshifting, prophesying pooka who is memory, guilt, and fate in one.

X. Conclusion: What the Title Means

Read whole, Give Them Unquiet Dreams makes two arguments that turn out to be one. The first concerns belief. Its critique is more exacting than “the doctors are wrong and the grandmothers are right.” It treats diagnosis as a social act, inseparable from the diagnosed person’s gender, class, marriage, and protectors, so that what is called schizophrenia in a confined single mother is called “the gift” in a favored grandson, not because the phenomena differ but because the surrounding world has already decided whose visions deserve a hearing. The second concerns guilt. Irish folklore does the work that fate and the oracle do elsewhere; the pooka binds second sight to psychiatry, shame to faith, and inherited grief to the illusion of time. But the pooka is finally the occasion and not the subject. The subject is the guilt that passes from Catherine at the well to Aiden at the sea, and the movement of the book is from that guilt to absolution—from drowning to the seal at Keem Bay, from the ghost the family feared to a man who learns he is that ghost and is told, in his mother’s hand, to forgive himself.

The title, after all this, reads less like a curse than like an inheritance the family has decided to accept. A quiet dream would be one undisturbed by the dead, by inherited guilt, or by a perception that will not resolve into a diagnosis anyone else can confirm. The Glencars do not get quiet dreams, and by the end the withholding of that peace reads less as tragedy than as fidelity—to Sinead, to Catherine, to Martin, to a family history that has to be felt before it can ever be settled. Through their unquiet dreams the family keeps its dead from going quiet. That refusal is the source of the novel’s suffering and, in the same measure, of its grace.

—Silver Current Press

Works Cited