Brandon has recently republished several Macken novels, and these are two collections of short stories, which date back to the 1960s and 1950s respectively. The jacket blurb calls him a "consummate story teller", which is possibly going rather too high Macken was a solid, honest, but slightly pedestrian fiction writer, who already seems very much a figure of his time. Or is it, perhaps, that the stylised, "rural" Irish short story which found such an eager transatlantic market thirty or forty years ago has, per se, become irrevocably dated both as a genre and as a style?