Louise Hegarty: "I was reading a lot about old actors who wore gorilla costumes..."

Having enjoyed wide acclaim for her 2025 debut novel, the meta murder mystery Fair Play, Cork author Louise Hegarty has followed it up with the wonderfully imaginative short story collection, Getting The Electric. The book commences in style with the subtly unnerving ‘If’, in which the narrator finds their everyday life thrown off balance by the sudden appearance of an axe-wielding troll.

“It grew out of a feeling during the pandemic,” explains Hegarty. “For a lot of people with health anxiety or hypochondria, that was a particularly rough time. We were all probably spending a lot of time online, and then there are the explanations of Covid, and the thoughts creep up, like, ‘What if this headache means I’ve got this specific illness?’ Or, ‘What if that pain in my chest is being caused by something worse?’

“If you have a tendency to feel anxious over those situations, it was made a lot worse. So it was trying to capture that mood. And then the metaphor of the troll, I guess it can represent something dark lurking around the corner in life. Or it could be online trolls, as we know being in the world of the internet can throw up its share of annoying encounters. The way the story is written as well, with these short instructions and cues, it’s associated with an online gaming vibe.”

Similarly disconcerting is the Kafka-esque ‘Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla’, in which a man’s reality is altered by having a gorilla costume fuse to his skin.

“I was reading a lot about old actors who wore gorilla costumes,” reflects Hegarty. “It was a specialised role that’s obviously disappeared due to special effects and so on. So, I was thinking about people in that world, and the concept came to me of the suit fusing with his skin. I was interested in how the person’s psychology would change and how they’d be treated by other people.

“Also, it was tapping into that idea of how gorillas were historically used to demean certain people – even awful old depictions of Irish people in certain English magazines.”

As well as those two darkly compelling tales, another standout in the collection is ‘Ancestral’, which focuses on an English peer and castle owner who – in an Edgar Allen Poe-like development – has his peace of mind thrown off balance by strange sounds emanating from his basement. Indeed, throughout Getting The Electric, monsters and eerie occurrences are recurring motifs.

“It probably comes from my interest in genre fiction,” Hegarty considers. “I think of them as literary stories, but growing up, I would have had that interest in crime, fantasy, horror and so on. It’s not that you necessarily start out to write a genre piece, but as you’re piecing the stories together, this stuff tends to surface. I like drawing on those different genre elements, placing them into the stories and seeing how they react.

“Hopefully you get something that has a certain authenticity and psychological realism. Then when you combine it with more unexpected stuff, you hit on something fresh for readers.”

Who were Hegarty’s biggest formative influences?

“The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano had a big impact,” she says. “I was very taken with his The Savage Detectives, which was first published in English around 2007. It’s about two Chilean poets in the 1970s searching for a Mexican poet from the ’20s. There’s so many different layers to what Bolano does as a writer.”

In Hegarty’s work, there’s also a sense of different realities overlapping, a theme shared with Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, who’s actually alluded to in Getting The Electric. It was definitely at the core of Hegarty’s acclaimed 2025 novel, Fair Play.

It told the story of Abigail, whose world was literally split in two following the death of her brother Benjamin. In one reality, she contends with grief and loss, while in another, an eminent detective arrives and attempts to find his killer.

“I’ve always had that interest in crime fiction,” notes Hegarty. “As well as the great stories, you start to untangle how the genre itself emerged and grew in different directions. During the First World War and afterwards, there was this explosion in popularity of puzzles and games.It was stuff people were doing to keep themselves occupied and entertained during difficult times in society.

“During the same era, there started to be this huge level of interest in crime stories, some of which had the properties of puzzles. This is the moment when Agatha Christie really took off. I suppose these are the origins of cosy crime.”

With Hegarty still resident Leeside, there are references to Cork culture in Getting The Electric, including cult rockers The Frank And Walters and halcyon days in the Sir Henry’s club. In terms of Hegarty’s cultural recommendations in the city, some culinary spots immediately spring to mind.

“First of all, there’s MacCurtain Wine Cellar,” she says. “It’s a wine bar and shop with a great, natural, biodynamic and organic wine selection. Then there’s The Glass Curtain across the road, one of the best restaurants in the city. Paradiso does probably the best vegetarian food in the country. I’d also recommend the Triskel Arts Centre, it’s set in an 18th century church, so you have to sit in the pews to watch a film or enjoy a gig.”

 

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Also on the cinematic front, Hegarty has another recommendation.

“Another spot worth checking out is the Gate Screen at the Arc Cinema,” she continues. “It’s a tiny screen in a multiplex that shows arthouse films. In terms of music, another cool spot is Plugd, which is a record store and café during the day, and a gig venue and sometime wine bar at night. Finally, another cool destination is Maureen’s, a beautiful pub in Shandon that also regularly hosts gigs, literary events and a monthly knitting club.”

• Getting The Electric is out now.