“BEAUTIFUL. Dark. Funny.” That’s how novelist Dan Mooney would like his work to be perceived by a weighty critic.
Meeting in a local, this Limerick man is there first with a Stephen King in hand and he is disappointed. Mooney loves King for his sense of menace but this latest from the horror King, he finds offensive to precedent.
Dan Mooney is having ‘a moment’ himself on the scene, his launch to ‘Me, Myself and Them’ [Legend Press] in O’Mahony’s Booksellers drawing in the masses in May. He sold out in latter weeks and a restock was called for.
Legend Press distribute in Ireland and Europe this year; Park Row publisher under Harper Collins takes over for the US in 2018. Strewth.
He is open about a big concern with mental health and ‘Me, Myself and Them’ is a reference to his protagonist Denis Murphy and the monsters Denis lives with. Or does he? Mystery piques and it’s a playful novel. The word ‘anxiety’ looms.
“For me, and I don’t think I am special about this, it’s the silence, the not taking about it, the not talking to friends and to family.”.
Is he Denis, the nervous germophobe and dandy? [Not to look at…tee-shirt and cigarettes]
“There’s a little bit of me in all the characters, but much more so in Denis, although his problems are much, much worse than mine ever were. He has wonderful people around him and no matter how wonderful and caring they are, he has internalised all of it [conflict, desperation] and is living with his own demons”.
Dan Mooney muses on the man’s isolation despite living in a shared house and an old flame, sunkissed Rebecca, having a tendre for him.
‘Me, Myself and Them’ was self published last year. It promptly won the Luke Bitmead Writers’ Bursary of €2,500 and that choice publishing contract.
An air traffic controller by day and variously, film maker, plus actor/ director with esteemed College Players and Torch Players, the on-stage comedian has a yen to be invited into ‘straight’ theatre. For us, it is easy to puzzle about the chiaroscuro that afflicts the stage funny man who grows dark when not under lights.
From wherever the affable Mooney thieves the time, he works in four-hour bursts and manages 5,000 words after a fallow start. Numerous rewrites and a murdered first draft later, he shapes the final issue – and his game is beautiful. This man can write and lightly, for all that hectic hammer of keys. A second book is underway.
Glittering prizes are that. It is having a readership and soon, that intercontinental push by a publishing powerhouse that makes Dan Mooney One To Watch. Be you monstrous or not.
