Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

The House by the Churchyard Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

The House by the Churchyard (1863) is a novel by Sheridan Le Fanu that combines elements of the mystery novel and the historical novel. Aside from its own merits, the novel is important as a key source for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The novel begins with a prologue in the voice of an old man, Charles de Cresseron, that is set in Chapelizod, Ireland, roughly a century after the events of the novel proper. This prologue details how, during an interment at the churchyard of the title, a skull is accidentally unearthed, which bears the marks of two crushing blows to the head and - even more disconcertingly - a small hole from a trepanning. The novel itself is Cresseron's reconstruction of the history related to this grisly item (though by and large his narratorial voice drops out and the novel is told from a conventional omniscient narrator's point of view).