ROBBIE ARNOTT'S PAGE: LIMBERLOST; and THE RAIN HERON—don't miss out on a major talent

LIMBERLOST
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron{review below}, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dual timelines of Ned's life: the summer he was seventeen, at the end of WWII, as he works himself ragged to earn the money to buy a small boat; and the rueful musings of his old-man self, on that passage: "He suddenly felt very old. Felt the distance between his youth and what he was now. He flexed his wrists, touched his face, wondered if the troubled boy of that summer would recognize the man he'd become."

We all wonder that, Ned; no one moreso than a man whose life spread before him and then happened to him. Summer of that seventeenth year starts in his childhood memories with the appearance out of nowhere of a whale at the mouth of the river nearby. This whale is wreaking havoc, destroying boats and lives, all very dramatic thus certain to appeal to an adolescent and fire his dreams of boat ownership and its promise of escape, of freedom. That is always the illusion, isn't it. Young men urgently need to escape from their lives. Not so much of course, that Ned takes on the care and healing of an injured quoll, a cat-sized marsupial that didn't make it unscathed around Tasmania' settler-colonial farms (in Ned's case, an apple orchard called Limberlost). Ned's squeamish discomfort with killing even the verminous introduced rabbits hes hunting to provide pelts for slouch hats, Aussie soldiers' signature headgear means he commits to returning the quoll to health and its natural home.

Unlike the other stories from Author Arnott, this one has no tint of magical realism. It's a strong historical story, one that moves us into the waning years of an Australian colonial reality that was consciously reshaped beginning in the 1970s. That reshaping, which redressed in small ways moving towards larger ones the horrors that the settler colonials unleashed on Aboriginal Australians and the fauna of the continent, has its other face examined here. Ned has spent his entire existence working, the land that supports human life has received his best and tenderest care; now he must confront the way that looks to his own children: "He realized his recollections might not be as clear as he'd assumed. It was a horrible sensation, feeling that the facts of his life had blurred. He wondered if his past was slipping away?"

As it must, Ned. As it will away from us all.

The beauty of Author Arnott's prose makes this a read to savor for me; its focus on a man in his terminal decline to oblivion rethinking his life appeals to me in its deep familiarity.

I've reworked this review from its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab. I've added links to definitions.

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THE RAIN HERON
ROBBIE ARNOTT
FSG Originals (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

The Rain Heron is the dizzying, dazzling new novel from the author of Flames.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "So much was ruined, either slowly or in red instants, and nothing was getting better and nobody was doing enough about it. And through the quiet carnage of the world I kept moving." A fascinating story made up of absences, of clothing not worn, of things not happening, of eyes unseeing. A novel centering absences sounds...unsatisfying. I can only advise you to trust Author Arnott, read the story, and see if my rating holds true for you, as well.

“A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain, it would not sprout If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them). Success and happiness were foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to go to bed unhungry. All she had was her hunger and her farm—and her farm, as far as she could tell, wanted her to starve.”

When an author creates a mythos for a place that has one well-known to most readers of English-language prose, we call it a retelling. What, then, is the word for Author Arnott's mythmaking for this exceedingly ancient land that Europeans don't know the mythos of, whose history is older than ours by many millennia, and yet it settles onto the mindspace of the people now there seamlessly? "When I first saw the bird burst into its high grotto, when I watched its dance of wet light, I was mesmerised by it. Then it took my eye, and that feeling was replaced by terror, and with the terror came extraordinary pain, as I felt the icicle of its beak pierce the jellied rim of my eyeball."

I don't really know but that's where we are.

“Paddling nearer, they saw that it was the unlucky farmer, dead or unconscious, her body draped over the branches like a nightgown hung out to dry. But more curious than this was what they saw next: a huge heron, the colour of rain, suddenly emerging from the flood in a fast, steep flight, leaving not even a ripple on the water beneath it. With a languid flap of its wings it came to rest in the crown of the oak, standing over the unlucky farmer, as if on guard.

The teenagers brought their boat to a stop. This water-risen heron was unlike any other they’d seen before—any other heron, any other living creature. Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird. Its body was pierced by strands of dusky light, and the tree was clearly visible directly behind its sharp, moist beak.

A ghost, one claimed. A mirage, said another. But before they could get closer the heron hunched its neck, flapped its wings and leapt into the sky. A thick spray of water fell from its wings, far more water than could have been resting on its feathers. Then it disappeared into the remnants of the storm.

Absences and spaces and takings-away and lacks...all make this near-future dystopian in an unflashy, unbombastic unnervingly real way. It could be that, as the 2025 US regime unleashes its evil agenda on the world, this feels too on-the-nose in the way that validates its rightness and essential truth-telling.

Why do they want it?
Who?
The generals or whoever’s in charge.
Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.

Nowhere in the text are there quotation marks or suchlike civilizing indicators. It's an effective technique for a post-apocalyptic story made of takings-away and spaces where things once were or might have been. Its message is "do more with less, things are not what they were, get used to providing things you're used to getting."

The Rain Heron does not come on demand.

I've reposted this review its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab.

LOW EXPECTATIONS, riffing on Dickens goes right for a change

LOW EXPECTATIONS
STUART EVERLY-WILSON
Text Publishing
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: I begin to record the history of it all, because if I don’t I will explode, leaving nothing to tell of me but a pile of ash. In this history I will try to leave nothing out, but I will also be careful not to incorporate any extraneous unnecessary shit. Like objectivity. Objectivity is for those who don’t have a point to make, or a side to take. There is only one side to this story and that’s mine.

1970s, Western Sydney. A boy and his mum living in a street where neighbours keep an eye on everyone else’s business. A detested bully. And a family secret, barely hidden.

Devon Destri flies under the radar. He doesn’t talk to anyone, calls himself hard of speaking, and doesn’t correct anyone’s assumptions of his low intelligence. If no one knows otherwise, no one will expect anything of him, and maybe he won’t need to expect anything of himself—that is, beyond running a highly lucrative porn-magazine racket. Only his fiercely loyal friend Big Tammy and Krenek the Hungarian refugee know that Great Expectations is his favourite book, or that he can read at all. But when Devon starts to piece together his mother’s secret, his intellect and charm are put to startling and devastating use.

Stuart Everly-Wilson’s Low Expectations is a heartbreaking and hilarious story of resilience, revenge and love that captures the complexity of vulnerability and bravado. Devon Destri, with his sharp wit and gift for one-liners, is a character you’ll never forget.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Anyone who's read anything I've written here in the past ten years knows that I admire one thing about Dickens: nothing. A chore to read at best, an excruciatingly twee sentimental boor at least, he's famous wherever English is spoken because he makes average people feel smart, and smart people feel godlike, for "getting" his stories and their layers. To me, that's like congratulating yourself for knowing tomatoes are fruits but having the sense not to put them in fruit salad.

Low Expectations stars a teen, one with multivalent social and physical challenges, whose favorite book is Great Expectations. So coming of age, Dickens veneration, and Australian setting. Not an immediate fit for my US-centric, anti-Chuckles the Dick self, then.

I got within an ace of giving it five stars just for being raucously its ownself.

You who belong to the Church of Chuckles know he's fond of the sesquipedalian sentence, the orotund ekphrasis, the hifalutin verbiage. Quite why Devon, our PoV character, loves him, then is Dickensianly (in the "stop-hitting-me-with-the-message" sense) clear. He's "hard of speaking," a beautiful little Dickensian (in the best sense of fulfilling a need for a phrase that no one knew was there except him) creation for someone who simply doesn't want to speak much. Better not to let anyone in on his secret: he is a smart, observant, sensitive guy stuck in a world that just has no place for that kind of time-wasting, but expects people to be hard, both -working and -hearted, to make it in their working-class world. Devon feels safe in his hidey-hole with the special needs kids, he refers to it as the "spaz Gulag" and now let's talk about lanuguage. Diametrically opposite to Dickens, Devon's narrative voice is choppy and frequently heavy on the "worty dirds," as a teacher of mine called them. He absolutely has no respect for anyone who isn't worthy in his eyes, including himself. For the 2020s US audience this can lead to pursed lips and furrowed brows. Either check your fifty-years-later, wildly different culture expectations of politeness at the door, or don't pick the book up...and I strongly encourage the former choice. The alchemy of the story is, like Devon's favorite story, in the way the entire experience of reading it subverts the thoughts and expectations you started out with so often that the wonder is you emerge with any expectations left.

This bitter draft of gall and wormwood comes about because our hard-of-speaking narrator learns a truly life-changing secret about the mother he disrespects and denigrates. As she's raised him by herself, I don't think you need a lot of brainpower to figure out what it's about. I will say that it didn't seem hugely surprising to me when it was revealed; I was by that time exasperated with Devon for not picking up on it before he did. What matters in this rough-tongued kid's world is keeping himself a small enough target to avoid more than the irreducible minimum of abuse and also attention. It makes him a more-than-ordinarily solipsistic adolescent. His eyes are sharp...his attention is not focused outside his self-defined sphere of defense. As he's breaking the law, he's wise to keep his thoughts from straying too far afield. Adult readers who're parents will, I'm sure, think the right thoughts about how the family-related things end up before they do.

With the laundry list of CWs, why would I rate this book so highly? Because I'm Devon's age and, even though I grew up in Texas, the culture of cruelty wasn't a lot different there. Instead of someone telling a loudly pruriently foulmouthed and prejudiced tale of the modern day in order to shock and appall and titillate, this story recounts the way it was in that time and place, and does so with clarity and purpose. The world was what it was, but Devon is a work in progress, and by the end of the book the Devon we met is appreciably more adult in the postive ways than I ever expected him to be.

But for all that, peruse the CWs and make sure you're not going to pass out when they come to pass because they all do.

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, The Age of Bronze Edition graphic novel retelling & THE BRIDE OF ALMOND TREE, Australian post-WWII disillusionment

THE BRIDE OF ALMOND TREE
ROBERT HILLMAN
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter Beth Hardy.

Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case her devotion is to the cause. Beth’s ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. This is the story of their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century—from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again—to find a way of being together.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Believing in A Cause has some costs. Patty and Wes Cunningham, Quaker siblings, are raised to believe their god has a purpose for them. When that purpose is made manifest, it is the organizing principle of the entirety of their lives from then on. World War II is the driver of Patty's purpose, as she serves Humanity in nursing its broken and abused; this takes her to Hiroshima and its almost unbearably damaged people, and her path in life is set for good. It leads her to the tender regard of a Japanese doctor, and Patty is sorted.

Wes, who serves in the war as a stretcher bearer, is wounded and realizes he wants one thing: to go home to Almond Tree, build a house, marry and raise kids who won't fight in wars. It isn't until this purpose in life is revealed to him that he begins to think about the party of the second part to this contract with god: mother/wife. When he sees his childhood friend Beth, everything clicks into place and he knows who he is to husband for his lifetime.

Elizabeth Hardy is a woman on fire. She ends World War II with an unquenchable Marxist faith, a belief that the Soviet Union is a Utopia, and that she must serve the Party however she can there in Australia. Wes, sweet and solid, isn't likely to assist her in any way getting the Revolution exported. His declaration of devotion is, well...not important to her. She says, "what about my sister? she'll do all that stuff for and with you!" but Wes, Quaker to his core, knows god wants him to serve Beth so he does.

Despite the devotion she does nothing to deserve and the huge amount of practical assistance she gets from Wes, Beth remains a loyal Communist to the point of being sent to prison over it. Beth's wildness is, it's clear, addictive to Wes and resonates with his own "must serve god's will" faith, so I was unsurprised by his eventual reward. Beth's passion leads her into ugly places and enables a user's streak in her. That she isn't perfect is, I admit, a relief but her imperfections are consistent throughout and clearly march along Wes's lines. After Beth becomes acquainted with the realities of Soviet Russia, she learns how far ideology can fall from reality. In the end, faithful, loyal Wes softens her landing and the life they lead can now begin.

Australia in the Cold War wasn't at terrible risk of falling into the Soviet orbit but there were many True Believers whose attempts to nudge the country there weren't successful. It's like all faiths to me, is Marxism. Unappealing, bringing out the worst in people, and making the world's most vile behavior Okay when it's for the cause. Wes and Patty's religious faith is presented as a contrast to Beth's political faith, but is equally gross. They're taught to be self-sacrificing for god's sake, not because it's the right thing to do. Wes doesn't even do the right thing! He enables an abuser and gets the back of her hand for it for far too long.

As historical fiction, I enjoyed the light shone on ordinary Australians' lives in the upheaval of WWII and its aftermath. As a novel, I wanted to shake Wes and shove him into Fanny Hardy's arms with a stern injunction to forget that crappy sister-in-law of his. And Beth needed to rot in the Soviet jail for her selfish, self-centered antics that could easily have cost her innocent family so much more.

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IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, The Age of Bronze Edition
EURIPIDES; ERIC SHANOWER; EDWARD EINHORN
Image Comics
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: High King Agamemnon faces the most crushing dilemma of his life. Kill his beloved eldest daughter? Or forfeit victory in the Trojan War? A father’s secret plot clashes with a girl’s romantic dreams in this chilling classic play from Ancient Greece.

The most powerful dramatic script by EURIPIDES springs to life anew in a fresh adaptation by writer EDWARD EINHORN (Paradox in Oz, Fractions in Disguise, The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein) with AGE OF BRONZE art by Eisner Award-winning ERIC SHANOWER (AGE OF BRONZE, Oz Graphic Novels, Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland).

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A graphic-novel adaptation of the basic story of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

dramatis personae from age-of-bronze.com
I don't really know what else to say; if you haven't read those stories, or haven't seen the innumerable retellings in such media as exist then you've got one helluva learning curve ahead. This graphic version will, I suppose, do nicely to get you into the story. The idea that Agamemnon was required to kill his own child for a war against his sister-in-law's little bit on the side. It's a stupid reason to go to war, and the cost of it was staggering.

The art is, as you'd expect from Eric Shanower, convincing and technically accomplished. The story is adapted from Euripides by playwright Edward Einhorn. His success or failure is a matter of personal taste; I liked it fine.

Familiar or unfamiliar as you may be with the source material, it's a fantastic and worthy project, executed well, and solidly entertaining.

UNDERNEATH, brutal yet concise true-crime novel about Mother & SHELTER, psychological horror in Australia

UNDERNEATH
LILY HOANG
Red Hen Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Martha Johnson wants to be a good mother and a devoted wife. It’s all she’s ever wanted in life, and she tries her very best, but when her husband threatens to leave her, her desperation reveals only one strategy that can save her family, punish her ungrateful husband, and earn power: murder.

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Disturbing story of disempowerment's most extreme and appalling cost. That it is based on a true story made me feel ill.

...I'm pretty sure this isn't purgatory, either. It's more just like, extension. Continuation. We the murdered continue on, right underneath the living, but we aren't alive anymore. We're just here: bodies, but not bodies, too. So far as I can tell, the living can't see or hear or feel or smell us, but sometimes, if I get close enough to Martha, I swear she can taste me. ... Because we were murdered, this is our punishment.

As one expects from stories published by Red Hen Press's Kate Gale, monadnock of the LA literary publishing scene for {undisclosed} years now, there is a weird and unsettling tension between the lovely language and the sheer awfulness unfolding inside those pretty phrases and unnerving images. Why should the murdered, especially these child-victims, be made to suffer punishment? Discuss amongst yourselves after reading this intensely book-clubbable book.

Incest...prostitution...child-murder...maternal child abuse...domestic violence...and told through a dead child's point of view. "Is this old man round the bend for good?" I hear y'all thinking, as you read my sentence above about the book being "intensely book-clubbable." No: I'm hoping to make it plain to you that this story is so viscerally real, so eye-wateringly honest about the actual experience of mothering for a not insignificant segment of women, that y'all bougie book clubbers could do with a corrective lens to all the saintly, rise-above-it-all, succeed succeed succeed "women's fiction" guff that gets Oprah'd and Reese'd. Please note that I am not attempting a knock on these book clubs, they are hugely popular for a reason and their choices are not all in one and only one vein...but they are very fond of a certain type of story (described above) and return to books telling it quite often. Don't fix what ain't broken.

I want people to look past the usual and see the raw edges where things have failed and fragmented in different ways. Where the fault lines that exist in much of the world go at a different angle. I include myself in this, as my periodic reviews of *shudder* poetry and *urp* YA stories demonstrate. Successful for me or not, these reads are in areas I'm hell-bent-for-leather not to ignore simply because I so very often find them...unpleasant...to read. As I've said many times, I do not want to die above the neck before I die below it. So I'm out there sayin' "yes" when people offer me the damn things instead of running away like I want to...challenging my prejudices is the only way I know to prevent them from becoming part of the bone structure.

With Underneath, Author Hoang very much did that kind of challenging. We're not innocents, readers all, we've read The Lovely Bones and/or seen its movie. Dead narrators in fiction go a long, long way farther back in time than that. I'm not sure this take on the story she's telling here, a sort of slo-mo In Cold Blood, is one I'd've recommended to her. (I sure as hell wouldn't've recommended using w-bombs.) But when you're fully in the flow of the story you can see why this choice was exactly right, and possibly the only one she could have made. There was no other structure which would've enabled the Bernice-to-Martha-to-Arlene transmission of woman-violence to come clear. It needed an eyewitness whose eyes weren't in the same place they used to be. Like, Earth.

The pace of storytelling...well...I don't exactly know what to tell you. This isn't a novella, but it's not a long book. It doesn't linger on any scene. It simply is Arlene...talking to you. The story seems, in my experience of reading it, to tell itself to you in some peculiar way. Maybe the narrator being a child, who specifically says she's a child but one whose, um, existence after death keeps her learning, is so disorienting that the story becomes more of presence than she is? I can't be sure...but to me, the story was its own narrator, and it called itself Arlene. (If that makes any sense to you, could you explain it to me?) It doesn't repeat itself. It doesn't leave stuff out (for long). It's got a pull like a river's current, not dramatic but inexorable and powerful, like it won't let you go once you're there.

So go with it.

The structural facts of a novel told in vignettes...in discrete story-slices, layered with the sadness that floats under the surface of the ever-expanding skin of mother eating, of child growing, of marriage to a man who loves only what he needs and not what he wants bloating as its death-gases seek escape...is irregular, like the crumb structure of the best bread is. Not for Author Hoang, writing about cake...endless cakes made and eaten, made and eaten, never ever shared...the dense, regular, sweet crumbs left on an unused party-plate. The coarse and unappealing crumbs, food for scavenging ants, of hollow-sounding adulterated loafs of dollar-store bread; these make Martha's and Arlene's lines as they slip and catch and form shapes no one wants to see, just sweep into a trash can or, at best, into a crumb-catcher for possible crushing and reuse after they're fully hardened and useless as food in themselves.

There is a crisis in this world. It's a crisis of unlove. There are so many, many people in the world who are unloved. Who can't love or return love or even conceptualize it. They're incapable of it; they need it the more desperately because of that. But they don't and can't and won't get love. They are love-less. Bernice? Martha? Even, in the end, Arlene...love-less. Love, you see, isn't a word or a fancy chocolate bar, or a birthday card. It's action, investment of time and emotion. And the tragedy, in the ancient sense as well as the modern, of this story is that It. Is. True.

Beautiful sentences telling a dreadful, tragic tale of love, in its absence and its perverse, incomprehensible to normies, twisted shapes. Read this and be very, very glad you are none of these people.

Read this and shudder to your bones: You are all of these people. Happy Spooktober.

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SHELTER
CATHERINE JINKS
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Meg lives alone. Her little house in the bush outside town is the perfect place to hide. This seclusion is one of the reasons she offers to shelter Nerine, a young women escaping an abusive ex-partner. The other is that Meg knows what it’s like to live with the looming threat of a violence at the hands of someone you love.... Nerine is jumpy and her two little girls are frightened. This tells Meg all she needs to know about where they’ve come from, and she’s not all that surprised when Nerine asks her to get hold of a gun. But she knows it’s unnecessary. They’re safe now. Or so Meg thinks… Then she starts to wonder about some little things. A disturbed flyscreen. A tune playing on her windchimes. Has Nerine’s ex tracked them down? Has Meg’s husband turned up to torment her some more? By the time she finds out, it’ll be too late to do anything but run for her life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember the first time the old aphorism, "No good deed goes unpunished," held real, tangible, awful Truth for you? Strap in....

Meg is the kind of friend you hope you'll have in an emergency or crisis. She's been there, she's done what she could, realizes how important the mere fact of showing up is. She'll give you shelter, she'll offer support, she will feed you and listen to you and Be There in the psychological, supportive sense of the words.

That's because she did not get those things when she so badly needed them during her devastatingly abusive marriage.

Nerine and her two daughters are, as we're shown, in a situation where Meg, her home (which she's ever so aptly named "Bolt Hole"), and her way with others are just exactly what they need. In they come; settle they do not. Nerine is in constant motion, constantly talking taking talking about how horrible the girls' father is (right in front of their scared little faces), how bad their lives were, how the courts have...insanely, incomprehensibly...given this vile predatory abuser visitation rights! Can you even imagine! she asks Meg, never waiting for an answer.

Then the nightmare turns real...awful things having been said, there are suddenly weird and unnerving things happening...frightening but, as yet, not violent things...footprints and noises where and when they shouldn't be, and all the time Nerine's talk talk talk about the horrors of the past makes little Analiese and Collette, her very young daughters, scared and jumpy. Meg, a grown woman with an estranged daughter living in England (can't forgive Mum for staying with the awful narcissistic personality disorder-having Dad), empathizes with all three, tries her best to distract and entertain the girls with rural life's many pleasures. Nerine? Nothing changes her focus. She is wound way too tight, experiences all things as threats and blames everything on the violent, awful ex who will, it comes to seem, jump down from a tree onto them with a machete!

As the unnerving stuff escalates into actual violence (CONTENT WARNING: ANIMAL CRUELTY), Meg begins to piece together some very, very strange facts and comes up with a truly frightening picture.

As I read the story, I was genuinely unsettled and disturbed. I can't say I expected the twist, having thought from the get-go there was going to be one. What it was, however, surprised me. Author Jinks deserves big ups for her unnerving choice of an ending. It was not what I'd thought it would be, and made the story that much more appealing to me.

Animal cruelty cost the book a star. I understood why Author Jinks made that choice, and I wasn't inclined to put the book down for good because of it, but it was dreadful and I warn my more sensitive readers (Kathy!) not to consider this tale for their own shelves.

The topic of incest and the crime of rape are factors in this story. They are hot buttons for many. I will say that Auhtor Jinks does not sensationalize them. They aren't dwelt on with ghoulish and repugnant "look! LOOK at how AWFUL men are!" glee. They are presented as facts, and as crimes; they are part of the women's experiences, and are told to us, the readers, as such.

I quite liked the pace set by Author Jinks. We're not in a hurry to get where we're going; there are interesting side characters and the land itself is a character of a sort. That, from my point of view, set the stakes effectively high for Meg, and for the reader. Anything that disrupts this lovely woman's Bolt Hole is a Bad Thing. And boy oh boy, the bad thing is very, very bad indeed. As Spooktober reads go, I think this one is as scary and as nightmarish as they come. Perfect for y'all ghoulies looking for a safe place to be wound up and scared witless!

FLAMES, Tasmanian debut author Robbie Arnott's full-tilt dive into magical realism, is a must-read!

FLAMES
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘A strange and joyous marvel.’ Richard Flanagan

A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte—who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.

The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island that takes us full circle.

Flames sings out with joy and sadness. Utterly original in conception, spellbinding in its descriptions of nature and its celebration of the power of language, it announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in contemporary fiction.

Robbie Arnott was born in Launceston in 1989. His writing has appeared in Island, the Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings and the 2017 anthology Seven Stories. He won the 2015 Tasmanian Young Writers’ Fellowship and the 2014 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. Robbie lives in Hobart and is an advertising copywriter.

My Review: I'm sure anyone reading my reviews knows of The Guardian's marvelous ten-year-old "Not-the-Booker" crowd-sourced literary prize. I learned of Flames's existence from the ginormous user-generated longlist for this year's jousting match. It looked intriguing, but the contest review sold me, being by Guardian reading-group, literary-link curator Sam Jordison...who also happens to be the co-director of Galley Beggar Press, the 2019 Booker Prize-unwinner Ducks, Newburyport's original publisher. So he's got strong literary chi. I trusted him; I took a leap of faith; I was amply rewarded.

This lovely debut novel from a small-yet-mighty Australian publishing house was a delight to me from the moment I met Karl and his seal. Karl fishes off the northern coast of Tasmania, that deep-southern island state of Australia, the last significant spot of land between Antarctica and the world. His seal, like Lyra's daemon in His Dark Materials, is connected to Karl's very essence and forms a large part of Karl's self—both image and awareness. Their "Oneblood tuna" prey, the giant and preternaturally perfect piscine predators found only in the Bass Strait (this is never stated but is implicit in the constant Japanese tuna-buyers' presence), bring in huge amounts of money from sushi-mad Japanese consumers through their local Tasmanian agents. Karl supports his family, his seal included, on the proceeds of their hunts. His bond with his seal is, however, the source of his undoing. His seal, being but a seal, is not immortal and falls to a hungry orca before Karl's appalled and helpless eyes and ears:

Karl tried to forget that clicking sound. But it was lodged in a hole between his ears, a backdrop to his days that he feared and hated but could not escape. He was reminded of it constantly: when a light switch was flicked, when Louise clicked her fingers, when his leaping daughters clicked their heels, when Sharon at the fish-and-chip shop clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she waited for the oil in the deep fryer to heat up.

There is no magical cure here. Not even for the cruel soulkiller PTSD.

Already, in the first twenty-five pages of the book, the magic of Tasmania's lands and waters bears the reader's weight. "How does a fisherman become the partner of his competitor the seal?" wonders the Western materialist tapping the touchscreen to deliver the next jolt of story-junk to his addict's brain. In these first pages, we're tossed into a magical world where dying mothers (if they're McAllisters) are cremated, return to life as themselves melded with ferny forest glens before recombusting, which thereafter somehow gives the grieving son the clarity to think, "Everyone dies, even when they’re reincarnated;" where the son, who is also a brother, encounters the maimed soul of Karl for a prelude to one of the novel's truly bizarre, and bizarrely perfect, themes, death as an almost-silent character in the weird, winding path the Tasmanian humans tread:

Levi. And then, as if his surname was an afterthought: McAllister. He...ran his hand through his hair. Everything’s fine.
Righto. The name bumped around between Karl’s ears where the clicks usually lived. I’m sorry.

(Be aware that this story is dialogue-light, and such dialogue as there is is italicized as well as unattributed; this could present a problem for some traditionally inclined readers.) This is a crucial moment, but how is the reader to know it? Trusting the newb of an author to put this scene, with its awkward Manly Emotions Inadequately Expressed, in this precise place at this exact juncture is a big ask. I sat a moment after reading this, aware that the expression of sympathy in "I'm sorry" wasn't connected to anything in Levi's head, and the idea of a McAllister wasn't connected to anything in Karl's head (yet); and yet this is a deep and important scene in the book, said my spidey senses. What, why, how?

I love that. Author Arnott didn't tell me! No rookie mistake of hand-holding me through the significance of Levi's peculiar purpose...gathering driftwood for a coffin, a wooden receptacle for much of the meaning in this book...and Karl's peculiar and solitary presence on this beach at this moment. I am left with the deeply experienced reader's tingle in the presence of Momentousness; I am left with a king-sized curiosity bump itching like mad; but I am left and the story moves on.

Levi wants something. (More than the proverbial glass of water, for sure.) He can't really be anything other than an authorial self-portrait because no one else would receive an assessment as cruel as, "Tweaky voice, even though his words were smooth. Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked," unless it was a self-assessment. He wants to control a world he can not comprehend. Levi wants to make the world behave, be orderly, not abandon him as he feels his father did, as he now feels his recombusted mother did; as his sister, whose death will result in her resurrection and recombustion because she's a McAllister woman, has when she discovered Levi was making her a coffin. He loves them all; they all leave him; where's the love in that?

Levi is reminding himself of his resolve: to show Charlotte that she wasn’t condemned to rise again, changed and ghastly, after she died. That her life needn’t end twice. That she needn’t suffer the same fate as their mother. That he had sourced this calming coffin for her and her alone; that in the face of their sorrow he had gone to great lengths to have it built; that he couldn’t go another day knowing she was in such pain; that he cared for her this much; that he loved her more than he could ever show with words; that the coffin represented all this.
Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words.

Levi is, I fear, the very saddest and least likely to be redeemed of the people in the story. Or so we're led carefully to believe.

Now meet Allen, the wombat tenant-farmer, decades among the wombats protecting and caring for them, that they might be turned into pelts. (This somewhat odd-to-non-Tasmanians idea is more suggested than explained.) Allen is a true lover of the deepest South this southernmost tip of Australia has to offer. His helpless adoration for the land is the occasion of some truly lush description:

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm.... If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. Its undulating moorlands of peat and buttongrass; the glints of white quartzite that blink on the mountain caps; the cold, clean welcome of its unbroken sky; the harsh cliffs and tea-coloured waters; the gathering sense of wild solitude that breathes out of every crack in the land. I cannot go back to the flat brown farms of the Midlands, or the over lush dairy pastures of the northwest.

The source of his reverie is anxiety, however, a deep and well-grounded fear that the farm owner will dispense with him when he finally builds up the nerve to describe to her the horrible fate that's begun to befall the wombats in his decades-long care. He's no longer caring for them alone, though.

Karl's daughter Nicola, training as a veterinarian, has come to the farm for work experience; she has established herself with Allen, a taciturn man, as trustworthy and useful. Now Charlotte McAllister arrives, aflutter with the fear of her brother the coffin-procuring weirdo following and finding her. The women are deeply affected by the mysterious wombat deaths, as one would expect. Allen is affected as well, though with time his need for the women's help and his desire to husband the wombats as a farmer is curdling, changing him into a fearsome figure and an angry old man:

Each morning I march off, gun in hand and knife in belt, as their eyes follow me filled with what looks more and more like fear. It is futile, feminine softness, and nothing more.
***
I watched {the wombats} lumber towards her, four-legged lumps of uselessness made flesh, and realised that I hated them, that I must always have hated them, that I had been lying to myself for all the long years I have been trapped in this barren southern hell.

Action is required; the women take it. Events swirl out of control, Allen transmogrifies into an avatar of rage and hatred unique to this one place in the world. His final acts of fury and aggression cause a shocking change to come over Charlotte: She finds in herself her mother's fierce power to burn. Only she finds it before she dies, and she finds it as a defensive weapon against old Allen.

This is the beginning of the most intense, most magical passage in the novel: The search of Charlotte for control over her power to burn. Nicola is the only person who can quench Charlotte's fire. She gentles the rage and softens the heat in her friend (not feeling it as unusual that she has this heat...maybe because of her own father Karl's seal-mate?), and takes Charlotte to a place where she cannot cause accidental damage to the world around her. She drives them to the Northern mountains, a beautiful snowy stony world where her father's Japanese tuna-buying friend has a stone-built home. Perfect! It's too cold for vacationing friends to want to be there; Australian snow-tourists aren't going to know where it is. Of course they have all the comforts...the flammable comforts...of home:

Nicola turned back to Charlotte, looking harder through the darkness, and saw a thin blue trail worming out of her ear. It had reached the cushion beside her head—a wispy, plasticky stream of it, rising up into the cabin. As Nicola scrambled towards Charlotte the smoking patch of cushion erupted into a small blue flame. With one hand she smacked it out, and with the other she rested a palm on Charlotte’s hot cheek.
Through her palm she again felt the pulse of flame from within Charlotte’s body. Again she felt it flicker out. She felt the burn in her stomach, hot and red, and knew she’d doused the fire. Again she didn’t want to let go.

Charlotte learns slowly to control the flames of her combustive power. Nicola continues to gentle her rage and bank her fires; they become (inevitably) lovers. And it is at this point that the novel shows how much it is a first novel, one by a man.

Women connected in intimacy must, of course, be sexually involved. If/then, right? No. Not that cut-and-dried, but that is where men go with it. To be fair, that's where men go with it among their own kind as well. I can think of few truly intimate friendships between men in male-authored stories. More often than not they are hidden rivalries or become sexual relationships. Still, it's not as though the issue is handled pruriently. We're not treated to much more than a kiss and some hand-holdings between the ladies.

Also not very deft is the handling of the female private detective whose presence in the narrative is to give us a reason to go on the road while she tries to find Charlotte. She's the device used to deal with an unwoven plot thread about another of Tasmania's many nature gods. A human causes the death of the animal-formed Esk God in his own river. That certainly can't go unanswered. The tough-as-nails prick-teasing ball-buster P.I. stereotype is launched to give these two strands a fast stitch. Her own story of having a strong physical sixth sense is shorted, as it must be unless the book is to be as long as the Bible. Suffice to say she serves her dual purpose, then goes quietly away. In fact, she was underused. Her role, larger and less broad-stroked, could've bridged the super- and the natural worlds. Missed opportunity, that.

It is also at this point in the narrative, the point where Charlotte and Nicola are together and dealing with the weirdness of Tasmania's hyperaware supernatural world, when we discover Charlotte's ancestral connection to fire. I won't spoil it. It's one of the lyrical joys of the book. At last we bring all the narrative strands together. Charlotte and Levi each learn how to speak their truths to each other; Nicola learns that her life's bonds are strong enough to bear the weight of multitudes; Levi, in a unexpected and amazing volte-face, learns his rudderless life's purpose. And it is Karl, at Nicola's behest, who weaves this into another strand between Charlotte's McAllister firey world and Nicola's seas and snows. It is exactly right.

The few issues above set aside, I'm left delighting in the sheer beauty of the language and the vigorous imagination that gave the magic of Tasmania a voice at last. This is what makes Flames a full five-star read. Earlier I mentioned the moment I knew when the threads of these disparate stories began to merge, that initial knowledge of Momentous Doings taking place. The full fruition of that sense came when the supernatural and natural worlds collided with all the force and all the passion of the stories told up to now; the resolution was revealed, the purpose of these journeys was enunciated:

A cloud’s sorrow: you cannot imagine it. But you can feel it, whenever a storm hits the world with uncommon force. When mountains crack and forests flood. When rivers surge and oceans bloat. When there is no true shelter left in the world. For the hardest storms are made of sorrow.

Sadness and sorrow powered the trip. The destination, left a bit in shadow, is as simple and as difficult as:

It had something to do with attraction...and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose.