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The Great Unknown

The Great Unknown_edited by Angela MeyerPlease keep a look out for the anthology of ghost, fantasy and horror stories The Great Unknown edited by Angela Meyer and published by Spineless Wonders (and which includes my story ‘Navigating’). These stories were all inspired by the Twilight Zone television series and so are creepy, uncanny and scary. What more do you want for those cicacda-filled nights in the beach house over summer? In bookshops now or from Spineless Wonders. (or click the image below in the sidebar).

From Angela Meyer’s blog Literary Minded:

‘In Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Reality TV’, a guest is confronted with her husband’s infidelity under bright lights, while Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ satirises American talk shows and a cultural obsession with sporting ‘heroes’. Chris Flynn’s ‘Sealer’s Cove’ has a nudist caught in a time slip. Carmel Bird evokes Edgar Allen Poe when oversized hares incite the folk of rural Victoria to commit criminal acts, and in ‘Sticks and Stones’ Ryan O’Neill has an academic attacked by a demonic alphabet.

There are darkly seductive artworks, disappearances and reappearances, altered realities, future visions, second chances, clever animals, knowing children, and strange presences in photographs and abandoned motels, in these stories by established and emerging writers. Contributors include Marion Halligan, Krissy Kneen, AS Patric, Damon Young, Chris Somerville, PM Newton, Deborah Biancotti and Kathy Charles.’

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Lexicon – Max Barry

lexicon2Wil wakes up in a US airport washroom. Two men have assaulted him and pushed a probe into his eye, trying to find out something about him but he doesn’t know what. He has to go with them, they say, or he’ll be killed:

… if you stay here in twenty minutes you’ll be dead. If you go to your girlfriend, who I’m sorry to say you can no longer trust, you’ll also be dead. If you do anything other than come with us now, quickly and cooperatively, I’m afraid, dead.

And so starts a wild road trip with Wil and Eliot trying to shake off the ‘poets’ who are after them (the other man bizarrely kills himself at the command of one of the poets). It is soon apparent that Eliot is also a poet, but a renegade one, and one of his former comrades called Woolf is out to kill him. The poets have the ability to command obedience in others by using a string of nonsensical words targeted to the personality of the victim (unfortunately for the poets they are not immune from other poets using the words on them).

We are then introduced to Emily Ruff, a young confidence trickster making a precarious living through scamming on card games. One day a stranger notices her ability to ‘read’ people, and gets her to answer a questionnaire. The answers are intended to show what sort of person you are, and once that is known, you can be ‘compromised’. The stranger thinks Emily might have what it takes to become a poet, so he recruits her and she joins their swanky school to be trained in psychology, lexicography etc. But Emily is a bit of a rebel and she rubs up against the straight-laced rules. When she has an affair with a fellow student (a total no-no, intimacy is dangerous as it reveals too much, leaving you open to ‘compromise’) she is out on her ear. She gets a reprieve, however, when she’s told to go to Broken Hill, Australia and blend in until she’s called upon to do her duty as a poet.

It’s what happens in Broken Hill that forms the basis of the events in the book—it’s a disaster that the press says is a catastrophic chemical spill, but is it?

Barry has a lot of fun with the idea of the power of words. The poets are all called after famous writers (Eliot, Woolf, get it?), and the media in all its forms is questioned, as is the profiling of people through what they say and write (Twitter, Facebook, anyone). But first and foremost Lexicon is a rollicking, tense, page-turning read. Barry’s clever structure means you are guessing right up to the end, and maybe if it doesn’t all quite make sense, who cares? I couldn’t put it down.

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True North – The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack

True_NorthTrue North by Brenda Niall is a joint biography of the writer Mary Durack (Kings in Grass Castles) and the painter and artist Elizabeth Durack. The north that is referred to in the title is the Kimberley region and the Durack cattle stations at Argyle and Ivanhoe carved out by their grandfather Patsy Durack in the 19th century. By the turn of the 20th century their father MPD Durack was running Argyle Downs and Mary and her older brother Reg spent time there when they were very young. However MPD thought his wife shouldn’t live in such rough conditions and he set her and the children up in a grand house in Perth while he remained for most of the year in the Kimberley.

The north, and the family history in the area, was a potent idea for the children, and they loved it when they could stay with their father on the stations (taking a steamer up from Perth to Wyndham). Two sons, Reg and Kim, fell under the spell so much that they tried, with varying degrees of success to make a go of it in the north. The stations, though, were not as lucrative as they once were and the family (once one of the top pastoralists) suffered straitened circumstances.

Mary and Elizabeth longed for the north and were averse to the Perth socialite scene, so when they left school they went to work on the stations as cooks and general help. It was only for two years, and the conditions were very primitive, but this time impressed itself indelibly on both women.

For Mary it would eventually prompt her to write her family’s history in Kings in Grass Castles and to write her children’s books about Aboriginal themes such as The Way of the Whirlwind. Elizabeth collaborated with Mary doing illustrations and covers and when Elizabeth struck out on her own as an artist the royalties from these joint projects kept her going.

The biography shows Mary to be the more considered and sociable of the two, and a ‘soft touch’. She had six children with an older man who chose to live in Broome for most of their married life while Mary remained in Perth, trying to write and raise the children. Elizabeth, by contrast, was more of a free spirit, acting rashly and repenting at leisure (she fell in love in the outback with an attractive but unstable man who’s wealth basically allowed him to drink himself to death). After the death of her first love she then fell for the bohemian writer Frank Clancy but Elizabeth was too much of a free spirit even for him, and the marriage failed leaving Elizabeth broke with two small children. She slowly built up a career as an artist but she was never really financially secure until much later in life.

By entwining the lives of the sisters, Brenda Niall is able to portray a picture of the whole family, and how the bonds of the sisters enriched their respective creative careers (lucky for Niall the sisters wrote prolific letters to each other). Niall also explores how encountering so potent an idea/experience when young can determine the direction of the rest of one’s life.