Book Review: This Is The Ritual by Rob Doyle

Relentless nihilism is again to the fore in Doyle’s short story collection, This Is The Ritual. Like Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, Doyle imbues his bleak vision with black humour: opener ‘John Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’ is an hilarious pisstake of the James Joyce industry; while ‘Martin Knows Me - The Lonely Struggle of David Haynes’ (one of three profiles of imaginary authors) is a similarly funny account of a writer who develops a fixation with Martin Amis. Doyle can also do straightforward dystopian horror: in the J.G. Ballard-esque ‘No Man’s Land’, the depressed narrator finds a strange kind of peace by hanging around an industrial estate.
With This Is The Ritual, Doyle has confirmed his status as one of the finest of the new generation of Irish writers.

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