The Accident Season

The Accident Season is the debut novel published by Irish author Moira Fowley-Doyle in 2015. In a work combining magical realism and horror tropes, Fowley-Doyle uses blunt, matter-of-fact descriptions of fantastic events and visuals to create a world where magic seems a perfectly reasonable explanation for events that are later revealed to be much more prosaic, yet no less horrifying.

The story opens with a flash-forward to a group of teenagers dancing wildly around a fire, engaged in some sort of magic ritual. The story proper begins with Cara, a girl living in Galway, Ireland, looking through old photographs and wondering how it’s possible that a girl named Elsie, who she was once close friends with, is in every photo, even photos from long ago of family trips far away. Elsie attends the same school and runs an art installation called The Secrets Booth, where students type their deepest secrets on a typewriter and then hang the pages from the ceiling.

Cara’s biological father is dead, and her mother and stepfather are divorced. She and her sister Alice anticipate the so-called Accident Season, the month of October when, every year, their family suffers a large number of injuries and other misfortunes, some fatal. Cara’s grandfather, father, and uncle all died during the Accident Season. Cara and her former stepbrother Sam have stayed friends after the divorce, and the beautiful Alice is dating an older musician named Nick who does not treat her well.



Cara is disturbed to discover that Elsie hasn’t been seen in several days. Even more disturbing is that no one aside from herself, Alice, Sam, and Cara’s best friend, Bea, seems to remember that Elsie ever attended school. Bea, who has a difficult home life, fancies herself a witch and predicts that this year’s Accident Season will be the worst one ever. Cara expresses her concern over the mystery of Elsie, and the group begins an investigation.

While searching for Elsie, the group comes across an abandoned mansion in the wilderness that they dub the Ghost House. They feel a presence there as if it is haunted. Deciding it’s the ideal spot to host a Halloween party, they begin preparations.

Cara and Sam admit they have romantic feelings for each other, which they initially find unwelcome because of their pseudo-incestual relationship, but come to accept as real passion. Bea kisses Cara, but Cara tells her she is not interested in her romantically, and Bea reveals she is attracted to Alice in actuality. Alice reveals she has attempted suicide twice before, and breaks things off with Nick because he is abusive.



Sam and Cara go for a walk in the evening, stopping at the bridge where the gang often goes to smoke cigarettes and shout their troubles and anger into the wind. The river has mysteriously frozen over, even though it’s not cold enough, and Sam and Cara go out onto the ice. Cara has been seeing visions of a magical world “breaking into” the real world. The ice breaks while they are on it, and both barely survive being carried away by the icy water.

At the Halloween party, they light candles all over the house, including dozens in the old master bedroom. The party becomes a magic ritual as Bea attempts to cast a spell, and they all get drunk and dance around the flames. The party gets broken up and they leave, but Cara realizes that Alice is not with them. They rush back to the house to find it on fire. Alice is inside and refuses to come out, but they manage to rescue her.

When they get home, Cara and Alice’s mother, Melanie, reveals the truth behind the Accident Season. Elsie was her first daughter, who died after the bridge failed and she fell into the river. Melanie’s first husband passed away, and she later married Sam’s father, Christopher. Christopher was a bad man who sexually abused Alice. When Cara caught him coming out of Alice’s bedroom, he took Cara to the ocean and tried to drown her. Melanie’s brother, their uncle Seth, confronts Christopher, so Christopher murders him and makes it look like an accident. Melanie finally gets a restraining order against Christopher and he goes away. Sam is devastated to learn how awful his missing father was.



Fowley-Doyle uses the magical elements as misdirection much in the same way the facts of the situation were right in front of Cara’s eyes. Cara chose to focus on the fantasy of the Accident Season because it was easier to blame a curse or other magical cause for their misery than to admit that such terrible things had been inflicted on her family through simple but horrifying abuse.