Francie Pig vs. the Fat Green Blob from Outer Space: Horror Films and The Butcher Boy

Abstract

Patrick McCabe (b. 1955) is of Ireland's most prolific contemporary writers; since his 1985 children's book The Adventures of Shay Mouse, he has published seven novels and a short story collection. Though his first three publications met with little critical response, his 1992 novel The Butcher Boy is now routine ly discussed alongside The Catcher in the Rye and The Lord of the Flies as of the preeminent twentieth-century novels of adolescent delinquency. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Literature Prize for Fiction in 1992. In its wake McCabe has, in an extremely short span, become of the high princes of contemporary Irish literature. The New York Times Book Review called McCabe one of Ireland's finest living writers, and the San Francisco Chronicle improved upon that claim, calling him one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland.1 A significant body of critical work has emerged concerning McCabe's par ticular brand of dark comedy, but little of the criticism considers McCabe's reliance on the horror films he watched in his youth as having influenced the images and plots of his novels. McCabe himself has explicitly pointed out his debt to such movies. In a 1995 interview, he told Pat Collins that, I've seen all those films God knows how many times? Anything that was good horror or schlock. I bring all that into my writing. It's so much a part of me that I couldn't keep it out even if I wanted to.2 Aliens, serial killers, and monsters run rampant through all McCabe's works, and most vividly in The Butcher Boy. A bleak and violent novel, The Butcher Boy fulfils Nicholas Grene's catego ry of the black pastoral, which he defines in opposition to the traditional pas