Fanged Rabbits Invade Kingzone

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday September 17, 1993

VAN IKIN

STEPHEN King's novels sell around 70,000 copies in Australia (in hardcover, of course; paperbacks do much better). King's closest rivals, Dean R. Koontz and Clive Barker, also sell extremely well, so at an ultra-conservative guess the Australian public gulps down around 2 million horror fictions a year - at least. The good news, then, is that local publishers are edging Australian writers into this market, giving them a bite at a slice of King's sales and the tantalising pot-of-gold possibility that horrors with a local flavour might actually create their own sales momentum.

Collectors take note: the first book to exploit the contemporary Aussie horror tag was Bill Congreve's excellent anthology, Intimate Armageddons (Five Islands Press, 1992). With stories from Robert Hood, Peter Corris, Terry Dowling and Rosaleen Love, it showed that horror's fangs are drawing sustenance from science fiction, crime fiction and fable. It has sold out, but an Intimate Armageddons II is in the pipeline.

The other precursor is Huw Merlin's Dark Streets, set in the gratification district of a sleazy, crumbling future Sydney. It takes comics as its model, strives for cinematic vignettes of violence and treats its characters as puppets made of meat. Whilst brazenly off-hand about gratuitous violence, the book unexpectedly creates an arresting sensitivity to the plight of the exploited girls who work as "pleasure technicians". Merlin is no stylist; Dark Streets is no masterpiece - it is energetic and feisty.

The latest shot at the horror market is Ghost Beyond Earth, and it's a winner. It sprawls over settings and subplots, capturing the "large canvas"roominess of the mega best-seller, yet it's a tightly plotted, taut thriller.

On the space station Freedom, an experiment kills astronauts and leaves others with apparitions. On Earth, a dead girl begins to reappear in an isolated cottage. And in suburbia, a satanic cult hones its rituals. Yes, they're linked - but how? Hague is good at pulling (fanged) rabbits out of the hat just as you start to think you've got the pattern.

Internationally, horror has fragmented into commercialised niches, with genteel ghost stories, the obscene excesses of American Psycho and the"gross-outs" of "splatterpunk". Hague does not resort to the revolting; there is violence but the horror is in the mystifying wrongness, the glint of naked evil in his characters' souls.

There's no moral to Ghost Beyond Earth, just a fast read that keeps you engrossed (and uneasy) until the last page. It's not a full-scale invasion of Stephen King's territory (he allows time out for leisurely development of characters and setting), but it's a neat blend of Dean Koontz's plotting and Clive Barker's sense of the cinematic. It would make a great film, as would The Vicar of Morbing Byle. The latter is a wacky tale that doesn't break the rules; it just bends them into pretzels, and it doesn't actually bend all of them, so you never quite know where you are.

There on the floor lay a pair of my underpants. Motionless now - but strangely humped and bulging | How could they have got there?

And then I almost jumped out of my skin. All at once the fly parted and two small blue eyes appeared in the opening. Something was watching me out of my own underpants |

Researching a Cambridge PhD on Darwinism, the Sydneysider Martin Smythe seeks information held in the quaint old village of Morbing Vyle - only to find that no-one in New Morbing wants to give directions. He solves the mystery of old Morbing Vyle - in a venerable Gothic manner, of course - but it's an Anglo-Gothic solution to a totally non-Anglo and thoroughly contemporary scenario | There's the vicar and his masterpiece (for which he must paint the grass blue); there's Melestrina Quode (a sort of Gothic daughter figure turned vamp); and there's the precocious talking baby, Panker, who just wants to return to the womb (and is small enough to do so).

This is no "straight" horror novel, but it's far, far richer than a spoof. Harland distils the essence of B-grade flicks and pulps, producing a romp that is pure celebration. The ghost of Richard Brautigan haunts these pages.

(By the way: the underpants escape, but he gets them back on his end in the end.)