SOURCE: “The Tale as Talisman,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 28, 1995, pp. 1, 5.

In the following review, Mahoney asserts that “McCabe can be forgiven … for his occasional ham-handedness and unlikeliness of plot purely based on the agility of his prose, the sheer force of his language ” in The Dead School.

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. So too, it seems, is love. Patrick McCabe's new novel provides horrible and humorous confirmation of both. The Dead School is a tale of the calamitous clash between old Ireland and new, a spellbinding story of betrayal and broken dreams narrated to wonderfully menacing effect by a professional storyteller who speaks in cozy, conversational style, smiling sweetly as he prepares to deliver what amounts to a stinging slap across his listeners' face: “Hello there boys and girls and I hope you are all well. The story I have for you this morning is...