Дойл Родди (4)

Это не добрые рождественские сказки, которые так хорошо читать детям на ночь.

Это страшные истории о тьме, которая стоит за порогом и ждет, когда ты сделаешь один неверный шаг, о странных и жутких существах, которые бродят за окном и иногда заглядывают по твою душу.

Нил Гейман и Эл Саррантонио собрали лучшие рассказы в жанре хоррор и саспенс, написанные признанными мастерами американской прозы (Чак Паланик, Майкл Муркок, Уолтер Мосли, Майкл Суэнвик…). Перед вами – коллекция умных, тонких, изысканно интеллектуальных, захватывающих и по-настоящему страшных историй: дверь, через которую Бездна всматривается в человека.

Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr. is unemployed, spending his days alone and miserable. When his best friend, Bimbo, also gets laid off, they keep by being miserable together. Things seem to look up when they buy a decrepit fish-and-chip van and go into business, selling cheap grub to the drunk and the hungry-and keeping one step ahead of the environmental health officers.

A triumphant return to the characters of Booker Prize-winning writer Roddy Doyle's breakout first novel, , now older, wiser, up against cancer and midlife.

Jimmy Rabbitte is back. The man who invented the Commitments back in the 1980s is now 47, with a loving wife, 4 kids…and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be.

Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle-his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money online for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin, between chemo and work he meets two of the Commitments-Outspan Foster, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever. He is reunited with his long-lost brother, Les, and learns to play the trumpet….

This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. It climaxes in one of the great passages in Roddy Doyle's fiction: 4 middle-aged men at Ireland's hottest rock festival watching Jimmy's son's band, Moanin' at Midnight, pretending to be Bulgarian and playing a song called "I'm Goin' to Hell" that apparently hasn't been heard since 1932…. Why? You'll have to read to find out.