Kinsale houseboat is home to author of ‘dark thriller'

A KINSALE-based author, who lives in a restored 1961 pleasure boat in Castlepark Marina, is to release his debut supernatural thriller in the coming weeks. 

Geffrey Kane, originally from Dublin, lives on the boat with his partner Siobhán, which they have masterfully restored, despite having no experience of repairing boats.

‘We’ve always wanted to do something like this and we saw it for sale in Athlone and the owner had tried to restore it, but it wasn’t successful, so we bought it,’ Geffrey told The Southern Star.

‘It’s still a work-in-progress, and because it’s a wooden boat, there is a lot more maintenance involved. But we’re enjoying living here on the marina with our dog George for the past two years, and we re-named the yacht Granuaile.’

Geffrey’s novel Recreant has been released on pre-order for the kindle on Amazon sites worldwide, and the official release date for both paperback and ebook versions of this dark, twisting tale of supernatural delight is September 22nd.

‘This story has been in my head for nearly a decade,’ Geffrey says, ‘and I did try to write it as a screenplay. I only used that as a background to writing the different scenes. So it’s been there a while with different incarnations, but I wouldn’t have been working on it solidly the whole time. I’d annoy my partner Siobhán with it and she would say “just publish it or shut up”, so she lit a fire under me.’

Despite being an atheist, Geffrey is still fascinated with peoples’ religion and beliefs.

‘It’s not a story that could have been told exclusively through religion because it’s about abandoning what you believe to achieve what needs to be done,’ he says. 

‘It’s always been something that’s been floating around, and religious belief is the highest belief you can have. It was always in the back of my mind.’

Geffrey says the ‘supernatural thriller’ involves some gruesome murders too. He plans do a virtual book tour through Facebook and raise awareness of the book online, hopefully leading to recommendations. 

‘It’s about an investigation and involves three priests – a dead priest, an alive priest and a pagan, fighting against a demon,’ he says. 

‘The pagan is a woman, who the priest is in love with, so clearly there’s a whole issue there of him questioning his faith,’ added Geffrey.

‘When I was coming close to finishing the book, I started sending out sample chapters to agents and to publishers. Their feedback time is between two weeks and six weeks and a lot of the time they ask you what’s your platform – as in how many followers you have on Twitter, and if you can get them to buy the book. A lot of them said it had potential, but that it wasn’t in their genre.’

Recreant is published through CreateSpace on September 22nd and on Kindle Select.