Suburbia’s crackle and hum

In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.

Since The Low Road (2007), Chris Womersley has carved himself a respectable niche in contemporary Australian noir. His work sits somewhere between literary and crime fiction, appealing to fans of both. He combines a Gothic sensibility and broody aesthetic with a finely tuned emotional barometer, blending the sinister and the domestic with apparent ease.

Ordinary Gods and Monsters begins with a foreboding air and the image of a foundry spewing toxic emissions over its suburban setting. The foundry is humble, barely deserving the title; the suburb also goes unnamed, but with its football club, railway line, and local McDonalds it could be any outer suburb of any Australian city.