Review – Shall We Gather At The River, by Peter Murphy

Shall We Gather At The River is a book of unfortunate endings — the stories of nine suicides hang from a plot-line that tells of a freak flood in the small Irish town of Murn. Fittingly for a book preoccupied with endings, we begin at the end: our hero, Enoch O’Reilly, is sitting in his father’s basement and staring down the barrel of a gun. The narrative then leaps backwards by 28 years to give us Enoch as a child in that same basement, stumbling upon his father’s old radio equipment and finding, in that forbidden room, a radio that channels an Old Testament sermon delivered in such rousing style that Enoch feels compelled by the power of Elvis Presley (who appears to Enoch in a dream that night) to ‘steal the preacher’s fire’. Expulsion from the seminary for atheism sees him return to Murn a self-styled ‘radiovangelist’ and Elvis impersonator.