Aidan Looney Audiobooks

Keeper of the Lake: Irish myth, dark dreams and the first Visions of the Otherworld

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.8/5 average

5 listener ratings

Who is Aidan Looney?

Blarney, County Cork: not the first place you would look for dark fantasy, though the more time you spend with Irish folklore the more obvious the connection becomes. Aidan Looney grew up there, lives near The Lough in the city now, and teaches English as a foreign language while writing fiction around the timetable.

Keeper of the Lake is his debut, and it began as most good strange books do, with something he could not shake: a run of vivid dreams in which cats moved through shifting, unfamiliar landscapes. He kept following the images until they turned into a world, then set that world against the myth cycle he had grown up with, the Otherworld of Irish tradition, where the border between here and elsewhere is thin and badly policed.

The result is animal fantasy with real teeth, written for teenagers but with none of the softening that phrase sometimes implies. Water, woodland and quiet places do most of the atmospheric work, which is very much a Cork inheritance.

Aidan Looney in audiobooks

Keeper of the Lake opens Visions of the Otherworld, and at just over eight hours it is a full-length listen rather than a taster. Survival, transformation and a mystery that unfolds at the water’s edge; the tone sits closer to Watership Down than to anything cosy, and it does not flinch from the dark stretches.

Claudette Eaton narrates, and her reading is the reason to choose the audio over the page. She takes the mythic passages seriously without tipping into portent, and gives the animal voices distinct shapes rather than a single storyteller’s hush.

The early scores are excellent, if still few in number. If dark young adult fantasy rooted in Irish myth sounds like your sort of thing, the audiobook is waiting below.