Flyaway

A beautifully haunting tale that melds reality and unreality, set against the stunning and harsh Australian bush.
This debut reads like the craft of an deft, subtle and practiced hand.
Flyaway sits with the reader long after the last words have been read.

‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere’

Flyaway brings us gothic fairytales and folk horror set in familiar, dusty-but-tidy towns, hours from anywhere, surrounded by a vast sun-bleached landscape.

Nineteen-year-old Bettina, prim, skittish, ostracised by the insular town, is a Shirley Jackson heroine transplanted to the Australian bush. When she receives a scrawled note reading ‘YOU COWARD, TINK’ it becomes clear that Bettina has gaping holes in her memory. What does the note mean and where did her father and brothers disappear to?

Solving this mystery means untangling a skein of urban legends and tall tales: of monsters hiding in the trees, shapeshifters and magic potions. Some of these tales have obvious roots in well-known fairytales, others seem familiar in that hazy ‘have I heard this before?’ kind of way. The frame story with Bettina is deliberately jumbled and confusing—just hang on for the ride—with a final rush of exposition tidying everything up.

If I didn’t already know the author was a Queenslander, the mention of kids sitting on their school ports* eating ice creams in the warm winter sunshine would have given it away. Flyaway’s small country towns and wide open spaces are so familiar to me and so lovingly rendered that I felt like I was there, and they works so brilliantly as a setting for Jennings’ brand of fantasy/folktale/gothic horror. 4 stars

*I read a digital ARC so there's no guarantee this little regionalism will make it to the final version. But I hope it does :)