Dragon Soul Press grabbed the opportunity to interview David O’Mahony, an author featured in Infernal Delights, Dragon Flight, Lured into the Deep, and Sea of Monsters!
1) Introduce yourself!
I’m a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland. Once upon a time I fancied following in the footsteps of the great fantasy writers like Tolkien or Goodkind but it was only in recent years, when I tried my hand at a historical fiction novel about an ancestor and found it only really clicked as a ghost story, that I realised horror had been my calling all along. I’m moulded by the likes of Stephen King, Mary Shelley, and others like that.
When not writing about ghosts and awful people I’m a senior editor at a news publisher, the Irish Examiner, and a husband and father of three who is a big fan of cats.
2) What prompted you to begin writing?
I enjoyed coming up with ideas. I’ve always harboured ambitions of being a writer, probably since I was quite young; I can remember writing a story about the devil appearing in a pub when I was 12 or so. I first got a proper taste for it in secondary school (I think that’s the equivalent of senior high school in the US, ages 15-17ish) when we were practicing creative writing ahead of state exams – I remember banging out a 1,500-word fantasy fiction piece in a night that took the teacher a few days to get to because it was too long! I started at least two fantasy novels in school as well, though they have likely been mostly lost to time, even if I found a batch of printed sheets from one in a box recently.
There was a long hiatus once college and adult working life hit, with writing only coming in fits and starts and nothing getting published. I returned to it in some force about two years ago after my wife asked the now-fateful question “how long would it take you to write a book?”
Still haven’t written that particular book (though it’s 66,000 words in), but I’ve published a horde of short stories all over the world and am on my second collection.
3) Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?
This is a bit like asking ‘who is your favorite child’, ha! Tough one, because at various times various stories are particularly important to me. There’s one piece, The Ties That Bind, which is a sort of cosmic fantasy but with grief and trying to cope with it as a major theme. It’s about a fisherman who has lost several children and a brother (the fisherman is named for one of my ancestors, and another of that family, Verling, lost at least 10 children), then meets an otherworldly traveller who gets stuck in the ocean because of the sorrow of the people who’ve drowned there. He sets them free, actually, but becomes stuck because the fisherman’s family isn’t able to process their grief and it’s like a web. I love the story so much I named my first collection after it.
My favourite horror ones are a toss up between Grave Tidings – where a man who can talk to the dead has to deal with famine ghosts in a graveyard, including one of his ancestors – and Apotheosis, which is about a bog mummy once revered as a deity but, now that the humans of the local village no longer fear or love her (they bury her), she can no longer hold in a creature that she absorbed centuries earlier to protect the village. Grave Tidings is in my first collection and Apotheosis will appear in a cryptid collection from Graveside Press.
4) How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.
I have something like 15 or 16 projects I class as “active”, including short stories as well as novellas. I’m currently focused on a novella featuring an occult fixer character called Liam Kincaid, who has appeared in a few of my pieces (including my novelette House of Sorrows, which will be out with Graveside Press in 2026). Having been asked to go to a wellness centre to track down a woman who’s fallen out of contact with her family, only to find it’s a nexus in time shielded by glammer spells. A sorceror and a sorceress from the 1400s have been remaking it every generation while harvesting the grief/sorrow of others to enslave an ancient spirit that they think can then bridge worlds – they want to use it to try and resurrect their son. It has a mix of the supernatural, elements of the gothic, and loosely draws on Ireland’s history with mother and baby homes. It’s not about those homes per se, but they weigh heavily on it.
5) What is your writing process like?
Chaotic. Much of the time the first line pops into my head and I work from there, or sometimes it’s just a particular image or idea that I start fleshing out by banging on the keyboard, or occasionally handwritten in a little notebook. I don’t really do plotting in advance because I find it sort of kills the enjoyment of being a discovery writer, though I will turn to it if a story gets particularly long or complex, or if I want to have a particular path to the conclusion spelled out for myself.
If I get bogged down in a section scene I just skip ahead. Often, while writing a later stage of the story I get a better idea for how the earlier ones should work, so start working that in. My current novella has been written in stages like that – I find it psychologically easier to feel like I’m filling in the gaps rather than conjuring out of thin air.
I like to get a story down and complete before doing a printoff and marking it up manually. After that I consider it finished.
6) Where do you draw inspiration from?
All over. I’ve been on a run of stories inspired by Irish landscapes and Irish history, though they underpin my horror pieces rather than fantasy – even if one of my recent fantasy pieces, Seafoam, is inspired somewhat by Celtic folklore around selkies. But I might see a piece of art and catch an idea out of the wind about it, or it might just be something I see in daily life. The beginning of my novelette A Winter’s Wrath – “five graves on a hillside” – was inspired by a walk past a local church, which is on a hill that has the graves of parish priests.
7) Who is your favorite author / what is your favorite book?
I’ll always go back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the original 1818 edition at least. To think she was innovating science fiction and body horror at the age of 18! But she writes beautifully elsewhere too, like with The Last Man.
Some years ago David and Leigh Eddings would have been high on the list, but I’ve found out more about their past recently so those books don’t hold the same place for me any more.
8) What is one goal you have for your writing future?
Finish and publish a full-length novel (the 66,000-word and counting one I mentioned earlier).
9) What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
That my ghosts tend to be people you can sympathize with.
10) Where can readers learn more about you?
Dragon Soul Press 