Introduction: Irish Gothic Studies Today

In Broken Harbour (2012), the fourth novel in her Dublin Murder Squad series, Tana French parallels Detective Mike Kennedy’s childhood trauma of losing his mother to suicide with the emotional, physical, and economic violence caused by the phenomena and legacy of Irish ghost estates constructed in the early 2000s. Just as ghost estates were originally booming middle-class suburban homes built from the unsustainable economic success of Celtic Tiger Ireland, French suggests in Broken Harbour that the Irish family structures that preceded the rise of Ireland to global prominence were equally unsustainable and haunt the domestic spaces produced during and after the Tiger. Kennedy explains in the beginning of the novel that he has a history of family vacations to Broken Harbour, once a lazy seaside town that is now frozen in time as an unfinished housing development that provides the murder scene he and his crew must investigate. When Kennedy finally admits that he blames his childhood self for his mother’s death, French returns to the private analogy she constructs early in the novel for the public pain of recession-era loss: ‘Places are like people are like sharks: if they stop moving, they die. But everyone has one place that they like to think is never going to change’.1 As readers of gothic fiction, accustomed to uncanny domestic spaces, we can assume, of course, that this place will undeniably change, transforming from an intimate setting imbued with nostalgia into an unfamiliar and threatening environment.