A most revealing character

“All writing is autobiography,” acclaimed novelist JM Coetzee contends. “Everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it.”

While some writers may disagree with Coetzee, or feel he has over-egged the point, it seems his quote is spot on for Dave Rudden.

In chatting about his acclaimed new book ‘Conn of the Dead’, the Bawnboy man volunteers how he modelled the story’s young hero on himself as a child. It was fortunate Dave revealed this as it’s unlikely his story about an 11-year-old boy battling a mythic sorcerer-zombie in the dungeons of the National Folklore Collection would have prompted the Celt to ask how autobiographical the adventure is. However, in sketching Conn’s character and foibles, Dave was thus re-examining his younger self “at arm’s length”. It provided him with invaluable insight.

“Conn is very like me at that age - he’s fidgety and odd and full of energy, and that sometimes leads him to clash with the teachers in his school, and his mother as well.

“Over the course of the book I was like, I think Conn might have ADHD, and then I was like, ‘Oh that means I have ADHD!’”

Dave’s suspicions were confirmed when a diagnosis followed.

“It was a very expensive manuscript to write,” he quips. The diagnosis has helped Dave, a former teacher, to realise the importance of recognising neurodivergency.

“My whole life I’ve thought I was just bad at planning and remembering and paying attention, and I beat myself up a lot about it. Kids with ADHD are criticised a lot more in school and at home because it’s easy for ADHD to look like laziness or daydreaming, but it’s a genetic condition, and while it requires management, it’s a part of me, and something to be in conversation with, not fought or suppressed.”

Far from holding him back, “in some ways” he regards the diagnosis as a “superpower”.

“I’m always full of ideas, I thrive in the chaos of events and tours and performances, and when it comes to writing I do have that hyperfocus that helps me get projects done.

“On the other hand, I have to work very hard to retain detail and long-term thinking that comes so easily to other people, and there can be a lot of overwhelm when I find I’ve committed myself to too much.”

Conn of the Dead is the first instalment of the ‘Tales of Darkisle’ series. He wants these to be “short, snappy, accessible, horror stories” for young readers to jump into.

Deciding Conn should be 11-years-old was given great consideration.

“As a former teacher, I do really see that as the age where a lot of kids stop reading,” he says noting they are about to go into First Year and are discovering video games and other distractions.

“Centreing on a kid who is not really a book kid, who is obsessed with video games, obsessed with horror movies, felt like I was meeting them halfway. “It was really about catching those slightly reluctant readers who want something short and digestible and a bit silly and a bit gory, and a bit gross - that was the plan.”

Conn of the Dead sees the hero sent home from school after one too many misadventures. However his Aunt Doireann, an academic, has to mind him and young Conn finds himself in the National Folklore Collection.

“When I was studying in UCD we were brought down to the National Folklore Collection which is this archive of local myths and legends,” he fondly recalls. The collection is brimming with wonderful old tales and traditions gathered through lengthy interviews with elderly people in the 1930s.

The library allowed him to research “the horrible bits of Irish mythology - the gross bits and the creepy bits” - all the bits his hero Conn loves.

“It is an absolutely magical library, and I just love the idea of staging a horror story in a place like that,” he says.

Just how “magical” it is, was shown when researching the sequel - called Nell on Earth which is about Were-otters. Remarkably, the collection again came up with the goods.

“I was like, ‘Do you have anything on magical otters?’ And they were like, ‘Hang on’, and went away and came back with a stack of books. ‘This is everything we have on otters, this is everything we have on magical otters, this is everything we have on shape shifters’.

It’s not a were-otter that Conn has to overcome, but an Abhartach; an ambiguous figure which folklore bestows in various guises.

“In some he’s a sorcerer, in some he is a guy who’s come back from the dead, and so I sort of mingled those together.

“Because 11-year-olds are so monster savvy, writing a classic monster like a zombie or werewolf is really difficult because they all know how to kill them. So I had this idea of: everyone knows the rules of zombies, but what if a zombie learned them too?

“So the Abhartach is a zombie and he knows how zombies works, so he protects himself from those things. He surrounds himself with a cloak of body parts so you can’t get his head which is a zombie’s weakness, and he’s working as hard to get you as you are to escape him!”

As such he has both Conn and the Abhartach trying to solve the problem the other poses.

“Also, Conn having ADHD, he has limits and opportunities placed on him by his brain, and maybe it’s not super-healthy to compare that to being a zombie, but I liked the idea of these two people battering against their limits and exploring the opportunities their weird differences gives them. It was a cool parallel to make.”

Readers and critics clearly agree as Conn of the Dead has been nominated and shortlested for the An Post Irish Book of the Year Awards 2025 in the Specsavers Children’s Book of the Year category (Senior). Dave’s delighted to be shortlisted.

“It’s a huge honour to be beside authors and illustrators like Leona Forde and Karen Harris and Kevin Moran. Ireland is a world leader in producing fiction for young people, you just need to look at like any of the books on any of the lists to see that.”

Asked what it would mean to actually win the award, he shifts the focus from himself as the recipient of the honour to Conn, who he describes as “perpendicular to academic achievement and behaviour”.

“When I go to schools I get kids coming up to me afterwards being like, ‘I’m Conn’. And I say, ‘I’m Conn too’.

“And he teacher is like, ‘Yeah that kid is Conn!’

“It would mean such an amount to get a thumbs up like that,” he says.