So, I’ve been released from some of my more onerous editing duties (briefly) and I’ve been able to pick up Stephen M Irwin’s The Dead Path again.
I’m halfway through after a day of varied ‘stuff’ (including Write-Club), but I’ve been reading steadily.
And it’s freaking awesome!! Not only is the gentleman in question the nicest man in Australian horror, he’s also a great writer with admirable control of his craft. It’s horror, but not gross-out horror. There are creepy gross bits, sure, but there’s also that creeping psychological horror that’s much harder to pull off because it requires subtlety in the writing. His observations about characters and places is finely detailed and wonderfully real. It’s always nice to recognise Brisbane and see it in a strange light (the last time I enjoyed it this much was in Kim Wilkins The Infernal). I highly recommend it!
“The bones of a city don’t change. Perhaps its skin grows tight or flaccid as suburbs grow fashionable or become declasse; crow’s feet spread from pockets – new streets, new arteries into fresh corpulence. But the skeleton of its founding roads, the blood of its river, the skull of the low mountain that looms over it with its thorny crown of television towers like its own blinking Calvary … these things hadn’t changed.”
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