Alienation and hidden histories: ‘unsettling’ new Australian stories reveal a distorted world

These are clever stories, but their observations – that the fear of causing upset and offence can easily lead to meaninglessness or total silence, that activists may be driven more by their own egos than the causes they promote – feel a little obvious in comparison to what follows.

The best stories in Cohen’s collection tend to be more expansive and mysterious. In Bugs, a recently divorced father rediscovers a beloved childhood toy and suddenly finds himself in a mental and physical decline that mirrors the deterioration of his doll.

The Holes details the lonely working life of a customer-service representative who becomes obsessed with a remote-working colleague. The History of Walking provides a series of brief observations on the seemingly unremarkable life of its protagonist and his stoic acceptance of both tragedy and persistent mild frustration.

The superb final story, The Enigma of Keith: Another Memorial, describes the attempts of its academic narrator to test whether roadside memorials have any effect on driving habits and traffic accidents. He does this by constructing a memorial at a random intersection and monitoring the area.

And he finds, to his surprise, that his memorial to the deceased “Keith” becomes an object of intense, emotional fixation. It invites online commentary and draws people to the location. The narrator is unable to detach himself at the end of his experiment: he feels a confusing sense of responsibility to Keith and his invented memory.

As I lay there in the dark, the question kept running in my mind: I created the memorial, but do I have the right to destroy it?

The theme of obsession recurs in subtly different ways between many of the stories in The Terrible Event. Characters become fixated on objects, experiences or people and are unable to withdraw, despite their better judgement.

In the longer stories, a slow, subtle comedy builds out of the gradual accumulation of absurdity. Seemingly mundane problems, situations and conflicts escalate in unexpected ways, due to either the obstinacy or haplessness of the protagonists.

The consciousness of animals

While it shares some comedic and satirical sensibilities with the Terrible Event, Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower offers a more radical approach to short-form fiction.

The 24 stories in the collection are divided into three thematically linked sections (“Birth”, “Life” and “Death”), and offer brief, jarring glimpses of the contexts and characters they consider.

Several of the stories touch on the conditions and consciousness of animals, in ways that are reminiscent of McKay’s award-winning debut novel, The Animals in That Country.

Ranging revolves around a support group that has formed in a world where men have mysteriously vanished. In the title story, Gunflower, the crew and passenger of an all-female medical ship (which provides abortions on international waters to avoid the increasingly restrictive laws in the United States) discover all known landmasses have disappeared overnight, leaving them adrift on an endless sea.

This sense of loss is also present in some of the more mundane scenarios in the collection. Smoko follows a young supermarket worker’s attempt to stop a small yet meaningful workplace privilege being stripped away by management.

The Two O’Clock focuses on the declining memory and eventual disappearance of an elderly grandfather, and Twenty-Twenty sees a family of anti-vaccination homeopathic medical practitioners struggling to maintain their ordinary routines amid the shifting reality of the COVID epidemic and mounting infections.

The fragmentary nature of many of Mckay’s narratives, which cut off abruptly without clear resolution, contribute to the disorienting, often hallucinatory feel of the collection.

The stories in Gunflower move between genres and subjects with the queasy swiftness of a fever dream. They are united, however, in their exploration of life in an increasingly changeable and precarious word.

Firelight: realist and ‘fantastical’

The final collection, Firelight, is John Morrissey’s debut. Morrissey was the winner of the Boundless Indigenous Writers Prize in 2020, and his work has previously appeared in This All Come Back Now: an anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction.

Like Cohen and McKay’s collections, Firelight also moves fluidly between realist narratives and more fantastical subjects.

The opening story, Five Minutes, emphasises this alignment of strangeness and mundanity. In this narrative, a disillusioned government worker invents a story about the earth’s imminent destruction. In Australia, the settler population is instantly disintegrated by an impossibly advanced alien species, who then compassionately allow the Aboriginal population – in recognition of over 50,000 years of deep connection with Country – five additional minutes in which to say their goodbyes.

The cosmic unfairness of this narrative, where pleas for the value of life, history, culture are greeted with genial bemusement by alien invaders, reflects the narrator’s sense of helplessness and vulnerability in his job, his forced acquiescence to the conventions of office culture and the capricious control of his manager.

It is a pitiable fate to sell one’s dignity to survive. To have one’s dignity valued at nothing though, to see it brought back to you, shopworn and yellowed at the edges – surely that is worse.

Explorations of disconnection and alienation recur throughout the collection. Special Economic Zone focuses on the impoverished and unacknowledged daughter of a mining magnate. When he dies, she is forced to journey into the heart of his crumbling and corrupted empire to receive a dubious legacy. Ivy follows the restless wanderings of a young man as he descends into paranoia while caring for his elderly mother in the suburbs.