U. Cronin
Location: Madrid, Spain
Bio
Born in the country town of Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland in 1975, I now live in Madrid with my partner and two young daughters and work in a research institute. While I was always a hungry reader and harboured vague notions of being a writer, as a young man writing was the furthest thing from my mind; after leaving school, I did a B.Sc. in Biotechnology in Galway’s NUI, an M.Sc. in Plant Science in University College Cork and a Ph.D. in Microbiology in the University of Limerick, the plan being to dedicate my professional career to scientific research. While having written extensively within my technical scientific field, I had never contemplated becoming a writer of fiction until a road-to-Damascus moment on the N69 between Listowel and Tarbert, Co. Kerry in the summer of 2011. Since then, most of my spare time has been occupied with writing. In whatever other free moments I have, I like to listen to music, play the guitar and garden (which here in Madrid means a lot of watering of plants and spraying for red spider mite). My ambition is to become as good a writer as I possibly can, eventually freeing myself from the cold clutches of science and earning a living through my scribblings. The type of writing that excites me is honest, intelligent, well-constructed and richly descriptive. My first novel, The Grotto, about the moving statue phenomenon, has just appeared on Amazon as a digital download. I am currently working on a second novel and a series of short stories.
Books
The Grotto
When a statue of the Virgin Mary in a Lourdes grotto outside a small village in rural Ireland begins to move, the countryside is plunged into a fever of religious mania. Not everybody leaves the grotto in the throes of religious ecstasy, however; after experiencing terror at the foot of the statue while witnessing its transformation into a diabolical figure, Brian McNamara begins to suspect that something malevolent is lurking within the stone. Upon further investigation, Mac and his friends become convinced of the presence of a demon-like entity within the statue. They discover that six pillars of the community calling themselves the “Guardians” are acting as the entity’s agents and are responsible for a spate of ritualistic animal mutilations in the locality. The friends immerse themselves in the world of demonology and Celtic mythology and trace the entity’s origins to Ireland’s mysterious megalithic past. As they learn how to harness the ancient power of stone circles to subdue the entity, it becomes a race against time to stop the Guardians, who have embarked upon a series of brutal murders and dismemberments — blood sacrifices the entity requires in order to escape from its stony prison within the statue.
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