This is the Ritual

"A tremendous talent. Every page fizzes with vitality." --Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone A young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a breakup finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland's vanished literary outlaw? Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker's roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book's pages. Layering narratives and splicing fiction with non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain. Immersive, at times dreamlike, and frank in its depiction of sex, the writer's life, failed ideals, and the transience of emotions, it introduces an unmistakable new literary voice.

About the Author :
Rob Doyle was born in Dublin and holds a first-class honors degree in Philosophy and an MPhil in Psychoanalysis from Trinity College Dublin. His widely acclaimed first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was chosen as a book of the year by the Irish Times, the Independent, the Sunday Times, and Sunday Business Post, and shortlisted in the Best Newcomer category for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards. Doyle's writing has been published in many newspapers and journals. He currently lives in Paris.

Review :
Doyle plumbs the bleaker aspects of literary life with startling precision and candor. I'm tempted to quote Nietzsche back at Rob Doyle: he's not a writer--he is dynamite! Except--like Nietzsche--he's a tremendous writer, too. And I have a suspicion that the author of this provocative and thrilling collection is going to get even better. The mutinous fragments of Rob Doyle's fictions are bilious, provocative and unnervingly compelling. Bold . . . He sets up a metafictional diving board and leaps from it with misanthropic glee . . . An authentically manic energy. Doyle displays a ludic sensibility . . . The stories are gleefully nihilistic . . . He has a gift for evoking the base and unpleasant aspects of life in vivid and visceral detail . . . It creates an almost hypnotic effect; a miasmic fictional space into which the reader slips. This is the Ritual is a masterstroke in experimental short fiction brimming with ideas, vulgarity and intelligence. And Ireland has just gained a cult author of exceptional talent. Doyle's cocky passion proves irresistible. He writes with the confidence of a literary giant so it is surprising to find Doyle . . . [is] only at the start of his career . . . Doyle is as good as everyone--from John Boyne to Colm Toibin--says he is. Relentless nihilism . . . Doyle has confirmed his status as one of the finest of the new generation of Irish writers. Bleak, brilliant stories . . . Don't be put off by literary allusions. These compelling vignettes stand up for themselves . . . They transport us beyond the routines of our daily round, and are visceral, scatological and frequently disturbing . . . It's refreshing to see a young Irish writer keeping up the cloacal tradition introduced by Swift and continued by Joyce. Some literary stars are born in the first paragraph. So it proves with Rob Doyle . . . Each story in this collection leaps to life with an importuning urgency, often just a few paces short of a kind of chattering hysteria. Doyle's gaze illuminates everything it falls on with a lighthouse intensity. It's a talent so self-evident that it's painfully conscious of itself. [These are] among the most compelling portraits that you will read this year, or any . . . A work of near magic. Doyle's characters, and the author himself, tramp and trip over people and places in this fragmented odyssey. A world-class writer. Ireland is producing some of Europe's finest short-story writers. Latest to shine alongside live wires Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett and Claire Keegan is Rob Doyle with a collection of hilarious, sharp-tongued page-turners . . . A bright, poetic, erudite new voice. I loved this. Rob Doyle pulls no punches with his uncompromising style. Doyle's fiction deals with life's major themes: sex, death, guilt, shame, the meaning of existence . . . Doyle's storytelling is compelling and engaging, suffused with wit, honesty and emotional intelligence. For sheer bravery and for style, for its integrity of vision and for its uncompromising tone, [I] admired Rob Doyle's Here Are the Young Men. God may be dead, but a new literary star is born. The language is unflinching, the story uncompromising . . . A powerful and provocative novel and easily the most honest account of young Irish people for many years. Recalling Irvine Welsh's work, especially Glue, and Niall Griffith's Grits, Doyle's brutal debut . . . paints a stark picture of middle-class youth unable to articulate why the unimpaired life is not worth living.