Pirates, ghosts and gangsters
A watery apocalypse, a haunted house and hard-boiled Aussies feature in three gripping yarns.
Before the world was engulfed by water, but as it became apparent that such a catastrophe was inevitable, Myra’s husband, Jacob, flees in a boat, taking with him the couple’s daughter, Row. Myra is pregnant with their second child, Pearl, who will be born on the boat the family have been preparing for the new lives they will have no choice but to adapt to: as seafarers.
Life adrift is precarious. Food is hard to come by, the fish stocks are becoming depleted. There is, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “water, water, every where” and scarcely a drop to drink. There are water bandits and pirates. Girls on the cusp of puberty are stolen and held on breeding ships. Myra must find Row before she is in danger of being taken. The sense of creeping menace and peril in Kassandra Montag’s AFTER THE FLOOD (HarperCollins, $35) is palpable; the new world created is wholly realised. This apocalyptic adventure yarn – with the addition of the mystery of the missing Row – is simply terrific.
Libby is 25 and living in the only flat she could afford, a charmless one-bedder in a less than desirable part of London, when she gets a letter from a solicitor. She has been left an enormous old house in the poshest part of Chelsea. This is her family home, although she never knew her family. She was adopted as a baby. The solicitor has more shocks in store: her birth parents and another mystery man killed themselves in the house she now owns; she has siblings, who have been missing for decades. So she inherits not just a house but also a tragic history and a mystery: who were her parents? Who was the mystery man? And where are her siblings? She should really sell the house, which would make her rich. Instead, she moves in, because if only these walls could talk. This house can.
The house, with its secret staircase and hidden nooks and crannies, is as compellingly realised as a character in THE FAMILY
UPSTAIRS, by Lisa Jewell (Century, $24), as its human occupants, past and present. This is top-notch thriller writing from Jewell who knows just when to creak a floorboard to create that perfect frisson of fear.
SNAKE ISLAND, by Ben Hobson (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), is as rough and tough as the Australian landscape in which it is set. The prose has a touch of James Ellroy posing as an Aussie about it: the dialogue is truncated and blunt while aiming for the philosophical. There is hardcore violence – to the characters, and not a few metaphors are murdered along the way – and, in startling contrast, a tender and gradual coming together of a split-asunder family feeling their way towards some sort of understanding and reconciliation. Vernon and Penelope’s only child,
Caleb, is in the pokey for having bashed his wife. The couple have decided never to see him again. Then they learn that Caleb is being badly bashed in turn, in prison, by the son of the leader of a local criminal gang. The police and prison guards seem to be complicit. So Vernon decides to appeal to the crime-gang leader, with catastrophic and escalating consequences. A small family at war with itself is now embroiled in a larger war with another family. The plot escalates to the point of laughable and unbelievable craziness – there is a scene featuring a character’s head being shoved inside a dead pig, and a car crash involving a kangaroo – but what Snake Island lacks in elegance is more than made up for by the regard Hobson has for his more decent characters.