Review: Secret History of Ireland: Invasions by C. Thomas Smith

Trade paperback, 100 pages
Published 2017

Acquired December 2017

Read June 2018

Secret History of Ireland; "Invasions"
by C. Thomas Smith

There's no soft-pedaling it; this book is terrible. You can see that from the incompetently formatted title onwards. It's self-published, I think, and the author for some reason thinks the subtitle goes in quotation marks and is connected to the main title with a semicolon. The book purports to be a retelling of Irish history, drawing on mythology. The issue is that the author has decided to be funny, only the author is not funny. Here's a bit from a page at random:

Did Téthur take a nasty fall, break a bone, get wounded? A wound that in those ancient times turned septic fast leading to a painful death. Or was Téthur ridding to within an inch of his life by eighteen young women who had bugger all to do of an evening and had yet to invent Ann Summers? Anything is possible. Though I should mention here that as a student of history, I don't know if I buy the whole idea of death by sex. For one thing, these stories have been passed down to us by monks, so sex, if the cause, would have been mentioned many times and in increasingly vulgar detail. And, sexual aids for women have existed for quite some time. [LONG DIGRESSION ABOUT SEX TOYS OMITTED] It is also possible that he ate a bad oyster or choked to death on a hazelnut with no one to offer the Heimlich manoeuvre as they were too busy diddling themselves stupid. You pay your money and you take your chance. (22-3)

The whole book is like that, unfortunately, just a long, unfunny, poorly written synopsis of Irish prehistory. The only good thing I can say about the book is that it made me want to read about these stories in the hand of a competent author. I got the book as a present, and I can only conclude the gift giver was the author in disguise, or the gift giver completely lacks the ability to discern good from bad.

The book has 100 numbered pages, but the actual "novel" runs only 79 of them. That's still about 74 too many.