In a quintessential, yet also satirical small Irish town, a woman walks into a gun shop, takes the first gun she sees, throws money at the appropriately dazed man, grabs some wrong ammo and gets in a cab. What follows is an often circumnavigated story about, again, a quintessential and satirized crime family that involves numerous murders—both past and “present”, incest, intense trauma, bad coping mechanisms, and the creation and ending of multiple narratives that allows those involved to go about their day-to-day.

Narrated from an anonymous person within the town, clearly more integrated in the rumour mill, as they’re able to elucidate on much more than all that, but conveys it all the same, I think one of Burns intentions is to implicate everyone, in one way or another. The crime family mostly all have named starting with J, and the story starts with a Doe and John Doe to make clear, as I see it, that to distinguish them further than to allow for their being different people going through the following motions, they might as well be anybody. The factions might be in any town. The well meaning bystanders, the same. The gender dynamics and the mechanisms that allows for the violence of all stripes—mostly toward girls and women, both, mind—are indicative of every town like it. But probably every place with the same socialization, even if the more specific factors like Ireland and Those Specific Factions are particular, it’s no question that this could occur in other families elsewhere.

It’s about people put into patterns not of their own making and holding them to account for it all the while not having anything systemic in society to address and break them out of them. There is a horrible insistence to these things. And Burns outright calls them evil. It’s vogue now to be speaking about moral relativism and grey morality and how people are both. The case that Burns brings us, though, is that there is also a lack of accountability and regardless of the trauma and unchecked behaviours, the people are responsible. As is the narrator and the peripheral components here. Our idea of Justice is as spoiled as how we raise these people set to rob people of agency. You can see it coming and the blind eye turns.

It’s a biting, scathing thing that feels only right. We are invited into the horrible parts of some of these peoples’ lives, implicated therein, and the turns of phrase try to make us laugh even as they know it turns our stomachs. Deadly serious and darkly clever in its laughs soaked in derision. Even the narrator has to digress multiple times - a coping mechanism, I assume - expounding on seemingly innocuous things, but often signal out gender dynamics and disallow the reader of any notions that there might be an explanation that makes it all more comfortable.

Never should it be, and certainly it isn’t here. I often had to take breaks from this. That’s how heavy it can be at times. But the prose are just right, as are the themes and the characters. Had we seen the prose refinement of Milk Man, this would have been an easy 5 star read. But it does vascular in it’s handling of the digressions. A few become tiresome and so circuitous to lose the thread. The voice is almost there, here. Make no mistake though, everything here is well worth Burns putting it to paper, and the reader to digest and sit with.