THE luck of teaching three days per week at Dublin’s National College of Ireland has afforded Dr Damien Mac Namara the luxury of time to polish off his first published novel. Working in the ‘young adult’ category because “younger minds are much more complex and more open to adapting to the world around them”, this Computer Science boffin, a Limerick man, has a cracking sideline as writer.
Crescent Books in Crescent Shopping Centre is one of a handful of outlets in the Mid West interested in his pacy debut, ‘Furious Angels’. Mac Namara, from Thomondgate, is selling well online as well in this first month of revelation.
What works? For a start, this sci-fi nerd who specialises in Human Computer Interaction professionally is gifted with words. Secondly, he had the wit to contract the former vice president of Harper Collins, Alix Reid, to edit his work. Then he landed Stephen King’s publishing artist Rhett Poddersoo to design the book’s galactic cover.
Still, its 296 pages of compulsive reading originated only with Damien Mac Namara, who has a sequel in the offing.
“‘Furious Angels’ is the story of two teenage guys, one, Andrew from America (14) and the other Irish, Will (15) his cousin who comes to look after him after Andrew is bereaved. Andrew has strange dreams in which he feels his late Dad is calling him from beyond. Will recognises the scene that Andrew, who is an artist, keeps drawing as it triggers a memory”.
Clue-searching arrives at a find in the forest and in to the otherworldly: an advanced computer that generates templates for high speed cars, weaponry and planes that become reality.
“This leads them to life and death, to choices they have to make, the voyage of self-discovery done physically and metaphorically in the RMN machine. They learn a lot about themselves in this journey through cool boys’ toys and planes”.
The in-jokes are fun. RMN is a tribute to this PhD’s soccer buddy, “a petrol head from Norwood Park”. His storyline is set in Limerick and Tara Hill is identifiable through a trail led by Easter eggs. Iceland, visited often by Mac Namara, features as does a white hot AI (artificial intelligence) teacher of martial arts, the beauteous and lethal Sam.
See online at furiousbooks.com for more on how “among the children and angels we shall find the faithful”.
