Anyone who knows me well knows that C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia was a huge factor in the person I've become. I cannot say I'll read them again, but when I read them in my mid-teens I was somehow different aftwards.

I remember devouring anything that was in any way associated with the Narnia stories and now still get a small thill out of mentions of the Wardrobe or Aslan like when I saw a car with ASLAN on the license plate outside Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago. Or when I remember the time I ate dinner off a table with a pedistal made out of the packing crate in which the Wardrobe travelled to Wheaton College.

Back when I was frequenting the bulletin boards on a forum discussing the Narnia movies I heard mention of a book about a girl who looked for the door to Narnia. I found it on Amazon and put it on my wishlist, expecting to know when I should buy it. I eventually broke down and purchased it about a month ago, and began reading it last week.

The book, A Door Near Here, is not the light fiction/fantasy I was expecting. It is a very heavy story about alcoholism that resulted in child neglect. It is about four siblings who stuck together and survived a very nasty part of their lives.

Katherine, the eldest sibling has a lot on her plate. Besides being only 15 years old, and all that that entails, she has been responsible for ther younger siblings for several years while her alcoholic mother worked long hours and dated promiscously. After losing her job, Katherine's mother drank more and spent much of her time, intoxicated, in her bedroom, leaving her four children to fend for themselves.

When the story opens, Katherine's main concern, apart from feeding the family from an empty larder, is her youngest sibling, Alisa who has developed a strange attraction to the woods behind her school. Alisa believes that a door to Narnia lies beyond the fence, in the forbidden woods. She also believes that if she finds the door she can bring back a magical cure for her mother.

Katherine thinks that Alisa is losing her mind and tries to disuade her from looking for the door and believing in Narnia and Aslan. Katherine's religion teacher is no help because he seems to be meddling in her life and encouraging Alisa to believe in Narnia.

This story, although it ends on a (sort of) positive note, is not a happy one. It doesn't have the magic of Bridge to Teribithia, another book that elicits images of Narnia. The book kept me interested. The writing was never clumsy or stilted. The characters were compelling enough - not perfect, any of them. The jacket of A Door Near Here explains that the book was the author's Masters Thesis. It is certainly the most interesting Master's Thesis I've read.

This is a short and slight book, a memoir written by a little-known author who claims to have been saved from alcoholism by his Dobermann dog and his Catholic faith.

That's it, really! It's a sobering antidote to the sickly sweet sentimentality that readers of Marley and Me by John Grogan may be familiar with, but overall, I did wonder why the author had bothered. It was hard to feel sympathy for a workshy and aggressive alcoholic who appeared to be his own worst enemy. Martin the Dobermann was well cared for though in the ten years that he was owned by Healy, and anyone who's owned a dog will understand his commitment and his attempt to describe the emotional rewards of a relationship with a wee dog who is affectionate and intelligent and devoted to you (funny how there isn't a spate of cat ownership books, eh?).

Healy describes his life, growing up in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, leaving school at fifteen, and his various romantic and family relationships as he gets older. Nothing much significant happens, and his story is a familiar (almost cliched) Glaswegian tale of a self-proclaimed 'hardman' getting in touch with his emotions and his relationship with God. The title is from a hymn named Here I Am, Lord that we used to sing at school. This book is only for the homesick and/or extremely sentimental.

Priest is a nominee for a 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel.This is Bruen's fifth novel with ex-Garda Siochana (police force) Jack Taylor. If possible, you should read the series in order.I skipped the previous book, The Dramatist, and, while not lost, there were details that would have helped to understand characters and events.

The book set in Galway and opens with Jack coming back to awareness in a mental hospital where he had been committed after a personal tragedy left him unable to cope with reality.After being released, becomes involved, unofficially, in the investigation of the murder and decapitation of a Catholic Priest, Father Joyce. Jack has a peculular and verbally hostile supporter in Ridge, a lesbian detective in the Garda who earlier put Jack in the hospital. There are forces in Galway who do not want Jack to pursue his investigation.

Along the way, Jack gains an unlikely partner, a young man who's idea of the work and lifestyle of private investigators appears to be based on too many TV shows and movies. He provides the lighter, comic elements to a side story line.The story lines are interesting but the real focus is Jack's attempt to deal with his alcoholism and inner torments. It makes for dark, gritty, painful reading and comes across as a realistic portrait of a recovering alcoholic.

The Catholic church doesn't fare too well in Priest. None of the clergy are remotely sympathetic as Jack's investigation turns up evidence that Father Joyce had an unnatural fondness for little boys.

Ken Bruen writes clean, spare prose without anything that could be considered filler. He is the master of the one word paragraph. Where other authors use punctuation to describe a lost of words, concepts, etc., Bruen creates his lists as if he was writing them down on a notepad. For example, here is the opening sentence of Priest:

What I remember most about the mental hospital     The madhouse     The loony bin     The home for the bewilderedis that a black man may have saved my life.and these sentences:I picked it up. Pascal, Pensees.     Stole that.     Didn't think I'd ever open it.     I was wrong.

If a word isn't absolutely necessary, Bruen doesn't use it.

Priest is a dark look at contemporary Ireland, the Church, and society. It is a compelling read.