![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/4774298_19_articleinline_We_Used_to_Dance_Here_by_Dave_Tynan.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nThis short story collection fizzes with friction, flair, and fury. Revolving mainly around millennial characters, Dave Tynan\u2019s first book, We Used to Dance Here, is a collection of 10 short stories set between 2016 and 2020 in his native Dublin.<\/p>\n
The crisp prose brims with immediate, revealing imagery.<\/p>\n
A joiner notices that, when concentrating, his colleague\u2019s tongue is \u201cpoking out like a little fish\u201d.<\/p>\n
Two friends drink \u201cdiesel-strong coffee while the sun buttered up Kate\u2019s kitchen\u201d.<\/p>\n
That Tynan conjures these observations with a cinematic eye isn\u2019t surprising: he has directed short films and the feature-length Dublin Oldschool (2018).<\/p>\n
The latter focused on estranged brothers, Jason, an aspiring DJ, and Daniel, a homeless heroin addict, when they meet by chance and wander through the capital during a lost weekend.<\/p>\n
Those themes of frustrated ambition and marginalisation dominate much of the book.<\/p>\n
\n Tynan portrays Dublin as a ruthless, chameleon-like, disorienting city.\n <\/p>\n
Many of his characters are bruised by stagnation: struggling in poorly-paid jobs, torpedoed by the housing crisis, and unmoored from their peers who are reaching the milestones of adulthood.<\/p>\n
R\u00f3is\u00edn, the protagonist in Baby\u2019s First Plague, embodies all these strains.<\/p>\n
She imagines herself in a draughty community hall, surrounded by similarly broken, embarrassed kin, standing up, and saying: \u201cMy name is R\u00f3is\u00edn and I am a resentaholic.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stories often centre on characters as they undergo a significant turning point in their lives: a relationship breakup, a devastating injury, a fledgling love affair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey never checked their phones,\u201d Tynan writes of a couple on a date. \u201cThey never thought to.\u201d We Used to Dance Here is freckled by displacement and emigration.<\/p>\n
In Forge Worlds, Oran, lives in an (unnamed) county he hates outside his native Dublin because it\u2019s where he could afford to buy, a place \u201ceveryone in the town called Howiya Estate, because half of them were Dubs forced down here\u201d.<\/p>\n
But the book also complicates the narrative that leaving invariably offers sanctuary. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t living in London,\u201d Tynan writes of a character. \u201cShe was surviving in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite its preoccupations, the collection is leavened by heavy dashes of humour, especially Tynan\u2019s finesse at skewering relatable contemporary exasperations.<\/p>\n
In Crispy Bits, Hannah, embarking on a relationship with Aaron, agonises about the etiquette demanded (\u201cplay the right games, dodge the wrong ones, check in enough but not too much\u201d).<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a character in her thirties is as exhausted by the \u201cwedding industrial complex\u201d of recurring nuptials as she is fearful of the \u201cRyanair bag gestapo\u201d.<\/p>\n
A thread glinting through the book\u2019s comedy is its marked Irish sensibility.<\/p>\n
Supermac\u2019s is only \u201cfor boggers and train stations and boggers in train stations\u201d.<\/p>\n
Likewise, the dialogue often unfolds in a distinctly Hiberno-English timbre, for example: \u201cHerself wants a fitted kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For his debut, Tynan confidently experiments with form.<\/p>\n
In How Do You Know Them?, maybe the collection\u2019s finest-crafted story, two London-based Irish characters meet at a wedding at home.<\/p>\n
The momentum suggests they\u2019ll get together, but this expectation is subverted: their brief interaction is stifled by inhibition, and they don\u2019t see each other again \u2014 despite visiting the same shops in London.<\/p>\n
In an essay in Ship in Full Sail, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn writes that, unlike a novel, a short story requires a \u201csingle poetic or ironic moment\u201d.<\/p>\n
\n We Used to Dance Here is laced with such occurrences.<\/p>\n
Arguably, the most incisive is In The Slaugh.<\/p>\n
Paddy is having a \u201cwake for the gaff\u201d from where he is about to be evicted.<\/p>\n
But in his house is a faded poster from the start of the pandemic emblazoned with words that, given his situation, drip with gluttonous irony: \u2018Stay Home\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This short story collection fizzes with friction, flair, and fury. Revolving mainly around millennial characters, Dave Tynan\u2019s first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[5193,288,93,61,60,33783],"class_list":{"0":"post-45795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books-fiction","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-person-dave-tynan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}