WTF is ‘women’s fiction’?!

Today's guest author contributor is Paddy O'Reilly. Paddy’s debut novel, The Factory, was listed among the best books of the year in 2007 in the Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, and performed as the Radio National Book Reading in 2009. Her latest novel, The Fine Colour of Rust , was released earlier this year in Australia and the UK, and comes out in the USA on September 4. She'll be talking about various kinds of fiction at the Melbourne Writers Festival from August 25.

Paddy writes:

When Elizabeth Lhuede asked me to write about why I wouldn’t want my book classified as ‘women’s fiction,’ my first thought was that I don’t actually know what the classification ‘women’s fiction’ means. I know the publishing and bookselling industries use it for marketing. And yet having my work categorised that way would make me very uncomfortable indeed. It feels dismissive. It feels like being shunted off into the section of the bookshop set aside for trivialities. It feels, in fact, like a throwback term, something that would have been used in the time when a woman’s place was supposed to be in the kitchen, reading her lovely unthreatening ‘women’s fiction’ once the house had been made all spick and span and the scones were rising in the oven.

What is ‘women’s fiction’ anyway? Unlike crime or romance or SF, it isn’t a genre with identifiable characteristics and conventions.

           Is it writing for women?

           Is it writing about women?

           Is it writing by women?

I asked a few fellow writers for their thoughts about the term ‘women’s fiction’. Here’s what they said.

• My understanding is that men don’t read fiction much these days, but women still do. (Is that right?) In which case nearly all fiction is women’s fiction.
• If there’s any such thing, it’s fiction about a female protagonist, written by a woman, that women want to read (and possibly men, too). Apart from that, it could be any genre, any style and about anything at all. 
• ‘Writing by women’ is nice, ‘women’s fiction’ not - it has an unhelpful air of relegation in terms of readers or subject matter or level. 
• On reflection I think women’s fiction is an irritating term. We have fiction about women. We have fiction by women. These are just statements of fact (and fiction about women is not necessarily by women, and vice versa.) But women’s fiction... that’s not fact, that’s someone’s judgement call. (It will suit women, it’s about women’s issues - relationships, parenting, etc, as if men don’t take part in those parts of life.) And it’s way too broad. I hate books about shopping and dating. I love books that examine relationships and family. And both those types of books are called women’s fiction. More ghettoising. 
• Women readers do seek out ‘women’s fiction’, whatever that means to them. It doesn’t mean it has to be confined to any particular type of writing, though. (And women also seek out other things to read.) But others (critics, prize judges, lit editors, possibly even booksellers) think it means commercial fiction about domestic life or about relationships with men and family members – like that’s a bad thing. So it’s really not a very helpful term in any way. 
• If I think of women’s fiction at all it would be as an offshoot of popular fiction and would include Mills and Boon, superficial romances and novels involving much shopping for products with trendy names. I recall a genre called ‘sex and shopping’, definitely women only stuff. I imagine it’s a useful category for marketing and shelving books. Readers of literary fiction might use the term derisively to show how intelligent they are. 
• There is no such category as ‘Men’s Fiction’ that I know of in the mainstream, so that would indicate that ‘Women’s Fiction’ is used to corral, marginalise and fence off the work by women from the mainstream. Do women writers themselves refer to their colleagues’ work as ‘Women’s Fiction’ – I seriously doubt it – so the question remains who uses this term and for what purpose? In the same way good writing has no gender, it is just good writing, only the author has a gender, which should not reflect on the quality of the work. 
• I’d be asking someone who uses it what she means by ‘women’s fiction’ – it’s usually only used in a demeaning way in my opinion

Meg Wolitzer, an American writer, also has a few thoughts on the topic.

‘...any lumping together of disparate writers by gender or perceived female subject matter separates the women from the men. And it subtly keeps female writers from finding a coed audience, not to mention from entering the larger, more influential playing field. It’s done all the time, and not just by strangers at parties or by various booksellers that have no trouble calling interesting, complex novels by women “Women’s Fiction,” as if men should have nothing to do with them. A writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down. Look at some of the jackets of novels by women. Laundry hanging on a line. A little girl in a field of wildflowers. A pair of shoes on a beach. An empty swing on the porch of an old yellow house.

'Compare these with the typeface-only jacket of Chad Harbach’s novel, “The Art of Fielding,” or the jumbo lettering on “The Corrections.” Such covers, according to a book publicist I spoke to, tell the readers, “This book is an event.”’ (You can read Wolitzer’s entire article here)

How tempting it is to write a book and give it the title ‘Women’s Fiction’. Then, to introduce a little cognitive dissonance, the cover must have large imposing lettering, and no pictures.

Why does it seem like that book would be ironic?

"Strong female personalities": Poet's Cottage by Josephine Pennicott

After a long break battling a computer virus and unreliable internet connections, this blog is finally able to post another review. Today's guest blogger is novelist Elisabeth Storrs. She chose to review Josephine Pennicott's Poet's Cottage. 

Elisabeth Storrs writes:

If you ever have doubts as to whether ghosts exist, then you should visit Tasmania. With its convict and colonial past there are buildings a plenty where phantoms reside. Poet’s Cottage by Josephine Pennicott is set in one such haunted dwelling - a house whose walls hide the clues to solving a crime committed decades ago.

Sadie and her daughter, Betty, leave Sydney for the small seaside village of Pencubbitt in Tasmania. Sadie has inherited Poet’s Cottage where her grandmother, Pearl Tatlow, was brutally murdered in 1936. Pearl was a ‘free spirit’ whose bohemian behaviour constantly challenged the morals and sensitivities of her neighbours. Acclaimed as an author of children’s books whose characters themselves have dark undertones, Pearl was charismatic, promiscuous, vicious and on the verge of madness.

The novel swings between the current day and the year of the murder. Sadie leaves behind the trauma of a divorce and the recent death of her mother, Marguerite, to write a book about her famous ancestor. Soon she is trying to uncover both the mystery of Pearl’s character and her demise. Sadie’s views are coloured by the fondness of Marguerite’s memories for her mother while Thomasina, Pearl’s other daughter, tells a different story of physical and mental abuse. Sadie learns more about the circumstances leading up to her grandmother’s death through a manuscript written by Birdie, one of Pearl’s friends. However the reliability of this account is thrown into question given Birdie’s relationship with Pearl’s husband.  

Poet’s Cottage is a story with strong female personalities but the house itself has its own character too. Its aspect is charming but a visceral foreboding pervades it which gives the story a gothic feel. At times I found the accumulation of ghost stories concerning both the house and the village to be overplayed, particularly when coupled with the presence of a sinister cloaked woman. Pennicott is skilful, though, in drawing the reader through the maze of various versions of Pearl while building up the undeniable presence of the dead woman’s spirit as the threads of the mystery are unravelled.

There is another spectre that looms over Sadie and Betty – that of insanity. Birdie tells how the temperamental Pearl’s mood would swing between elation, obsessiveness and despair. There is also evidence of a deeper history of mental illness in the family. While Pennicott hints of this legacy, she never fully develops Sadie’s fear that she might not only have inherited Pearl’s beauty and writing talent, but also her madness. Nor does she fully explore Sadie's apprehension that seeds of instability might have been sewn in her teenage daughter as well. And while Thomasina’s tortured childhood is vividly depicted, I would have liked to know a little more about Marguerite, the favoured child.

Poet’s Cottage is an accomplished, engrossing novel with fine language and powerful descriptions of the small town inhabitants of Pencubbit in both past and modern times. Most of all, in creating the damaged and damaging Pearl, the author has created a character so compelling and complex that the image of her lingers just as surely as the strains of music from her gramophone drifted through Poet’s Cottage both before and after her death.

Details: 
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Released: 20 March 2012
ISBN: 9781743345535

Currently available for the following AWW participating ebook stores for $14.99: Avid Reader, Readings

 

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of The Wedding Shroud, the first book in a trilogy set in early Roman times. She was inspired to write the novel after seeing a C6th BCE sarcophagus depicting a man and wife in a tender embrace. Discovering the story behind the couple led her to the mystical Etruscan civilisation and the inspiration for her story.

Elisabeth lives in Sydney with her husband and two sons. She blogs at http://elisabethstorrs.blogspot.com.au/.

The Wedding Shroud was published in Australia/NZ by Murdoch Books and is available as an ebook worldwide, including at the following AWW participating e-bookstores (currently listed for $9.99): Pages and Pages Booksellers, Shearers, The Book Shuttle, Fosters Little Bookshop, Abbeys, Better Read Than Dead, The Avid Reader, Readings, Australian Online Bookshop. The sequel is due to be published in 2012/13.

 

A reviewer's perspective & Meg Mundell's Black Glass: Annabel Smith

Author Annabel Smith gives her perspective on reading and reviewing books by Australian women, including Barbara Jefferis Award shortlisted novel Black Glass by Meg Mundell. Mundell's book was also recently shortlisted for The Australian Science Fiction Foundation's Norma K Hemming Award which recognises "excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class and disability."

The shortlist includes the following outstanding AWW novels: 

• Bell, A.A. Hindsight
• Douglass, Sara. The Devil's Diadem
• Falconer, Kim. Road to the Soul
• Goodman, Alison. Eona
• Hannett, Lisa L. Bluegrass Symphony
• Isle, Sue. Nightsiders
• Mundell, Meg. Black Glass
• Roberts, Tansy Rayner. The Shattered City

Annabel Smith writes:

Almost a decade ago I saw David Malouf read from his collection of short stories Dream Stuff at the Victorian State Library. During question time, someone asked Malouf if he had read Ulysses. Malouf had already responded to several idiotic questions during this session and this one had me squirming in my seat. But Malouf replied graciously that he had, and waited, along with everyone else, to see where this might lead. “I just can’t get to grips with it!” the questioner blurted out, confessionally. “Can you give me some advice?” Malouf’s advice was that life was short, and if a book wasn’t speaking to you, you should move onto one that did.

This is advice that I have always followed as a reader. When asked to write a review of the year in Australian fiction for Westerly, I decided, after some thought to apply that same practice to my reviewing. A book review is understood to be subjective. However, I believe a good review strives for objectivity wherever possible, or at least admits to its limits in that regard. As a writer, I’ve been on the receiving end of reviews that have seemed unfair; one in particular, where it was clear to me that the reviewer had read only the first section of my novel, and that his review did not represent my work as a whole, and was not therefore a balanced review. I believe struggling though a book that I don’t connect with is guaranteed to result in a review that is resentful and therefore perhaps unfair to the book in question.  Books I dislike or am unmoved by are not necessarily bad, they are just not for me.

One of the reasons I undertook the Westerly fiction review was because I knew I was guilty of cultural cringe when it came to Australian fiction, and I thought being forced to read more of it would give me an opportunity to adjust my perspective. And I did read some fantastic Australian books published in the last twelve months.  Only a handful of those, however, were by women writers so when I came across the Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge I saw it as a good opportunity to acquaint myself with more great writing by Australian Women Writers.

The books I’ve read and reviewed (on Goodreads) so far are:

Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville

When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett

Inherited (Short Stories) by Amanda Curtin

Shooting the Fox (Short Stories) by Marion Halligan

The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood

A Common Loss by Kristen Tranter

Black Glass by Meg Mundell

The books I want to read are:

Five Bells by Gail Jones

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung

What the Dead Said by DJ Daniels

One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity by Caroline D. Hamilton

Too Close to Home by Georgia Blain

Gone by Jennifer Mills

Above and Below by Stephanie Campisi

My Sister Chaos by Lara Fergus

Here is my review of Black Glass by Meg Mundell:

Meg Mundell’s debut novel Black Glass is the story of two sisters and their search for each other in a city of the not-too-distant future. The black glass of the title is the glass of surveillance. Those who inhabit the city’s various zones are not only watched but manipulated by technicians who subtly influence behaviour through the use of scents, sounds and lighting at a subliminal level. The text includes email exchanges, transcripts of conversations and internet search results, adding to the sense that in this brave new world nothing is private.

The novel is richly detailed, containing brief, beautiful descriptions and surprising metaphors. Mundell’s dialogue is one of the novel’s great strengths - witty, pacey and authentic, it positively crackles with energy and renders the characters perfectly.

A former journalist and government advisor, Mundell conveys a great deal of cynicism about the relationship between the media and the government. At one point, one of the characters reflects on how the media relies on “an endless supply of human folly and greed, criminality, bad luck and exploitation.” And this is exactly what Mundell serves up in her exciting debut: a blackly funny, sinister and gritty exploration of marginalisation.

AnnabelSmith’s first novel, A New Map of the Universe, was published by UWA Publishing in 2005 and shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction. She has had short fiction published in Westerly and Southerly, been a writer-in-residence at Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre and holds a PhD in writing from Edith Cowan University. Her second novel, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot will be published by Fremantle Press in November 2012.

"Masterfully crafted": Belinda Alexander's Golden Earrings reviewed by Christine Darcas

Yesterday on Twitter, Astrid (@asteriskthat) put out a call for names of Australian women authors of historical fiction. Angela from Literary Minded suggested Kate Forsyth, M L Stedman, Mardi McConnochie, Lisa Lang (interviewed by Angela here), Marele Day and Gail Jones. Marg Bates' suggestions included Kerry Greenwood, Elisabeth Storrs, Jules Watson and Kate Grenville. Paula Grunseit added Jesse Blackadder, Tobsha Learner, Kim Wilkins and Judy Nunn. Vassiliki Veros recommended historical romance authors Anna Campbell, Anne Gracie and Stephanie Laurens, to which Kat from BookThingo added Christina Brooks (and I'd add Isolde Martyn). Other authors of historical fiction include Geraldine Brook and Jessica Anderson. Can you recommend any other Australian female authors of historical fiction not listed above?

Another of Marg Bates' recommendations was Belinda Alexander. Alexander's novels have appeared worldwide, including in France, Germany, Holland, Poland, Norway and Greece. When asked what fiction by Australian authors are her favourites, Alexander answered, "I am always hanging out for the next Kim Wilkins and Kate Morton novels. I love how their stories unfold. I have always admired the styles of Helen Gardner and Drusilla Modjeska. Their styles are different to mine – I often find Gardner’s work a challenge to my vision of beauty, but that’s good. It’s always good to be challenged." (Australian Literature Review) 

Today's guest review is by fellow Australian author Christine Darcas. Here she reviews Alexander's 2011 publication, Golden Earrings.
 
Christine Darcas writes:
Golden Earrings by Belinda Alexander is a masterfully crafted, rich feast of a read. Knowing too well the amount of time, effort and hope that goes into writing a novel, I won’t review a book unless I have only good things to say about it … and I have lots of terrific things to say about this one.

Alexandra creates a passionate, deeply interwoven story about a girl, Celestina, born in Barcelona’s early 20^th century ghettos, who survives to become a world class Flamenco dancer. Through Spain’s turbulent civil unrest, she becomes involved with the Montello family whose wealth and naïve sense of privilege amidst Spain’s elite represent everything she has been raised to hate. The book opens in 1970s Paris with Celestina’s ghost appearing to a young, disheartened ballet dancer named Paloma who lives with her grandmother, Mamie, in the same building where they run a small ballet studio. In the solemn quiet of that early morning, Celestina wordlessly gives Paloma a set of golden hoop earrings. And so the mystery begins.

The book’s setting sweeps expertly between Franco’s dictatorial ascendency in Spain and 1970s Paris. Even while we read about Paloma’s more contemporary challenges, the brutal atmospherics of Spain’s civil war and their implications for individuals - in this case Celestina, her family and all of the Montella family members - permeate the story. Alexandra’s characters love, hate, betray and are betrayed. The romance and intrigue build with slow-burning intensity, as does the full realisation of the destructiveness of key characters’ deep-seeded misperceptions and misunderstandings about each other as a result of their shattered circumstances. Just when you might think that Alexandra can’t raise the stakes any higher, she does.

She also clearly did extensive research. Not only is the story satisfying, but so is the history lesson. In considering early 20^th century history, many of us may be inclined to focus on the two world wars to the extent that they overshadow the ferocity of Spain’s civil war and the ways in which it scarred its population. This account will certainly encourage you to reflect on that further. Her knowledge of the cultural and artistic details of her eras - including the emotional and technical aspects of Flamenco dancing, piano concertos, Catalan traditions and language - is equally impressive.

I was particularly gobsmacked by this book’s structure. Alexandra tells the story from three points of view while working between two different eras. Plenty of experienced writers would falter with this. But instead of rehashing prior scenes, Alexandra moves from each point of view to the next in a way that seamlessly moves the story forward. This was definitely a book that I was sorry to see end.

***

Another AWW review of Golden Earrings appears at:

• Jacqui's My Journal

 ***

Guest reviewer Christine Darcas is the author of two novels Dancing Backwards in High Heels and Spinning Out, both published by Hachette Australia. 

Giveaway opportunity: If you are interested in reviewing either of Christine Darcas' books for the AWW challenge, please nominate which book in the comments section below and include your email. (If more than one person wants to write review, a name will be picked out of a hat.)

"A consciousness raising exercise": Sean Wright on AWW Challenge

One of the first male book bloggers to sign up for the Australian Women Writers Challenge was Sean Wright, well known as @SeanDBlogonaut on Twitter, and author of the blog Adventures of a Bookonaut. Sean kindly agreed to discuss why he signed up, his experience of gender bias and his journey with the challenge so far.

Sean Wright:

I am really enjoying being involved in the Australian Women’s Writing Challenge this year and appreciate the chance to speak to others interested in the challenge.  I’ll discuss why I chose to join the challenge and what I have observed about women writing in Australian speculative fiction that might be different to men.

Why did I decide to enter?

by Deborah Kalin

It was a culmination of things.  Last year I began listening to the wonderful feminist podcast Galactic Suburbia, three women, each with a unique place in the speculative fiction landscape - Alisa Krasnostein, a small press publisher from Western Australia, Tansy Rayner Roberts, an author from Tasmania and Alexandra Pierce, a reviewer from Victoria. 

Their approach to promoting feminism (indirect and conversational) got me thinking about my own reading and resulted in me completing a comprehensive review, a gender breakdown on the reading and reviewing on my blog. 

It was a lesson in implicit gender bias for me.  Prior to the review I believed that I was reasonably well-balanced reader.  I had no issue with reading female writers and was quite pro-feminist.  The results were embarrassing to say the least, the split being somewhere around 18% female to 82% male, novels read. 

I made a decision that year to try and balance up my reading and reviewing.  For the general reader I am inclined to say read whatever you like, but for a reviewer like myself I think there’s an obligation to try and be balanced. 

My end of year result was a 60/40 split in favour of men.  A distinct improvement but still not the balanced result I was aiming for.  I found that towards the end of the year I simply reviewed what came in the mail box and wasn’t too focussed on making sure that I was a balanced reader.  In that sense I feel that I probably fell into well established and largely unconscious preferences. 

This year, with more self awareness, I decided that I really needed to enforce some blatant structural change (I see this as the only way for me personally to get around implicit bias).  So I signed up to the Franklin-fantastic (read 10 and review at least 4 books) level and the dabbler category.  I have already hit that target 10 books and 10 reviews but the intention is to keep going, because frankly the speculative fiction scene in Australia is bubbling over with excellent female writers. 

The other reason is that I think it’s probably necessary to swing my reviewing in favour of female writers to make an impact as a consciousness raising exercise. 

Having favoured women authors this year I am comforted by the freshness and the quality I have discovered. This depth of quality in the field has me laughing at those who might cry tokenism when it comes to preferencing women over men, who might foretell a fall in quality.  That view assumes that men who get on our best seller lists are there purely by virtue of merit.  My own personal view is that as a culture, we generally preference quality men’s writing over quality women’s writing.

In the speculative fiction field do women write differently to men?

by Rowena Corey Daniells

Where I do note differences is around some subject matter.  Some women authors will include plot points or devices that probably would not feature in a male author’s story.  Tansy Rayner Roberts for instance has a character in her Creature Court Series that works as a dressmaker.  This profession forms an integral part of the character and the plot, it’s a continuing feature and focus in what is a violent and sensual fantastical adventure.  I am not sure I have come across a male writer who has used a female profession* in quite the same way.

The consequence of including such devices or plot points is that it makes the work fresh especially for me as a male reader.  It’s offering something different than the standard fantasy tropes.  Kim Westwood, whose work is on my reading list, is another writer who comes to mind in her exploration of gender. I’d be hard pressed to think of a male speculative fiction writer who is exploring similar issues. 

Margo Lanagan’s most recent book, Sea Hearts dances around the interaction between men and women, mothers and sons.   Claire Corbett manages to fuse both hard science fiction, with mystery, social commentary and issues of parenthood in When we have wings.  In Madigan Mine, horror novelist Kirstyn McDermott cleverly inverts gothic horror tropes by altering the gender. 

Conversely I can also think of other female writers who tend to write in a more  traditional vein, Deborah Kalin with The Binding Duology and  Rowena Cory Daniells with her King Rolen’s Kin Trilogy (although this does feature a non-stereotypical gay relationship) readily spring to mind.

So that’s a somewhat indecisive answer.  What I am finding though is that female authors of speculative fiction in Australia are in the ascendant, they are producing an abundance of work and it’s pretty much all top shelf.

I‘d like to thank Elizabeth for the opportunity to guest post, I love the challenge and the expansion of my perception with regard to women’s writing in Australia.

 

* By female profession I mean that it is one in the book and there is more than passing reference to types of dresses, stiches etc. 

Sean Wright is a blogger, reviewer and genre commentator writing at Adventures of a Bookonaut.  He currently works as a casual relief teacher for the Department of Education and Child Development in South Australia. He aspires to be a published author but does more aspiring than writing.  He can be found most of the time on twitter under @Seandblogonaut. His blog has recently been nominated in Sydney Writers Best Blogs 2012 competition.

Getting to Grips with Horror and Madigan Mine

Award-wining Fantasy writer Tansy Rayner Roberts ventures across to the dark side in her review of horror writer Kirsten McDermott's Madigan Mine. Tansy writes:

I hesitated at first over the challenge to review a work outside my usual genre - not because I didn't want to do it, but because I have such eclectic genre tastes.  I'm known as a fantasy and science fiction writer, for instance, but also write YA and for children, and am shortly to have a new crime series published.  I read quite a bit outside those three genres as well, especially chick lit, with the occasional romance, and classic literature.  I almost went for 'modern literary' as a genre but after hearing so much anti-genre sentiment from those in the literary scene in talks surrounding the Stella Prize,* I really felt the need to wave a genre flag quite dramatically.

Which brings me to horror. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the genre, and after several years reading short stories for review, was willing to dismiss the whole lot of it as misogynistic, shlocky and unpleasant.  But it was Kirstyn herself, a friend and colleague, who called me (and my fellow presenters on the Galactic Suburbia podcast) on my bias.  As she pointed out, I had over the past couple of years raved happily about several works of Australian horror, and dark fantasy.  I enjoy her work, and the work of people like Kaaron Warren, Peter Ball, Margo Lanagan and Paul Haines.  Was I not just falling into the trap of saying that all the stuff I liked was, by definition, not really horror?

Given that our podcast has an ongoing theme of examining your own prejudices as a reader, I was utterly shamed by this comment, and have done my best since not to contribute to the way that horror is often summarily dismissed as worthless.  After all, exactly the same thing happens to fantasy all the time, and I hate it when I hear a fantasy or science fiction classic "re-classified" by a non-genre reader who doesn't want to admit that the thing they just read and loved was actually fantasy or science fiction.

But here's the thing - I still don't like horror.  When it's brilliant, I will read it and appreciate it, can even marvel at how it does that thing very well, but I don't enjoy it.  Kaaron Warren's Slights was a masterful horror novel, and it made me feel icky for weeks afterwards.  I still haven't quite recovered from reading the brilliant and disturbing "Wives" by Paul Haines.  And don't get me started on what Peter Ball did with unicorns in his acclaimed novella "Horn," or how I can't reread Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down" [short story in Black Juice] because I have had children since the first time I read it and I'm pretty sure it would break me into pieces.

I've still only read one Stephen King novel, It, which I loved and hated all at once.  I gratefully took the 'out' offered to me when someone (I can't even remember who) told me that if you've read It, you pretty much don't have to read any other Stephen King novel ever because it does all the things.  And so I didn't.

I recently overcame my own discomfort with horror as a genre to present a seminar at the Hobart Women in Horror film festival, Stranger With My Face, and to be a judge of their horror script competition, and found myself drawn with fascination to discussions of the female gothic, and the various other tropes that were examined, turned over and reimagined in the scripts I read.

I still don't like horror.  But it intrigues me.  The idea that a genre can be formed from a feeling, from a few overlapping emotions, rather than plot formula, character expectations or a particular kind of world or idea... that is deeply fascinating and compelling.

All of which is a terribly long way around to saying that it took me a year to pick up Kirstyn McDermott's Madigan Mine (when you like a person you really don't want to hate their book) and found it compelling, disturbing and thought-provoking all the way through.  I'm pretty sure I still don't like it, but that's okay, because this isn't a book that wants to be liked.

It's a book that kinda wants to freak you out and Kirstyn, you achieved that for sure!

Madigan Mine is the story of a not-as-young-as-his-lifestyle artist drop out type bloke called Alex, who begins the novel trying to deal with the death of Madigan, the young woman he has loved since childhood, who became his lover but was never entirely his.  Madigan was the talented one, the one with all the personality and the passion and the drive and the emotional issues - Madigan, in short, is far more interesting than the hero, and it's hard not to think she would have made a far more interesting protagonist.

Luckily for the readers, Madigan totally agrees with this sentiment.  As Alex drifts back and forth through grief, flashbacks and day to day life, Madigan is working to bring him down, steal his body and come back to life through his physical presence.  Or... is she doing it at all?  Is Alex having a mental breakdown?  Has his obsession with his angry tragic girlfriend pushed him over the edge?

It's to the author's credit that a bunch of utterly unlikeable characters come so beautifully off the page in all their self-absorbed glory.  The balance of horror with reality is subtle enough that I am reminded more of 'literary' thrillers like Donna Tartt's The Secret History or Barbara Vine's A Fatal Inversion than any other horror work I have read in recent years.

Wow.  Do you see what I did there?  I totally tried to make Madigan Mine sound awesome by claiming it wasn't really horror.  And I wasn't even trying to make a point.

But yes, unpleasant characters, sinister goings on, art, the horrors of upper class Melbourne suburbs, and all manner of powerful visual descriptions that pop off the page.  This is a horrible book, really.  But I couldn't stop reading it.

Kirstyn McDermott has done something very clever here, making a male character into the 'haunted woman' prototype often seen in gothic fiction.  She has also, in Madigan, created a marvellous monster who wreaks destruction as much when she is alive and human than when she is a ghost, or a figment, or an obsession, of the protagonist. 

I may be a little bit more afraid of Kirstyn's brain than I was before I read her book.  And that's what horror is all about, right?

Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of fantasy novels Power and Majesty, The Shattered City and Reign of Beasts (the Creature Court trilogy).  She also recently authored a short collection, Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press). She blogs at tansyrr.com, podcasts with Galactic Suburbia, and can be found on Twitter as @tansyrr.

In 2011, Power and Majesty won both the Ditmar for Best Novel and the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. The Shattered City and Love and Romanpunk both received Aurealis Award nominations for this year.


* Tansy writes: At a recent discussion panel in Hobart, for instance, one of the panellists made belittling, dismissive comments about all manner of genres including chick lit, romance and science fiction, implying that women's work in these fields was unimportant and that only Literature was worth discussion - despite the fact that the Stella Prize itself has overtly stated that it is inclusive of genre fiction.