Fear is the Rider

"Short but powerful, Cook takes the reader on an action-packed, tension-filled ride....A page-turner."—BookMooch

"A true dark classic of Australian literature."—J. M. Coetzee on Wake in Fright

"A kind of outback Lord of the Flies."—Crime Time UK on Wake in Fright

From the author of Wake In Fright comes this chilling short novel that's part Wolf Creek and part Duel.

A young man driving from Sydney to Adelaide for work decides to take a short detour into the desert. He turns his hatchback on to a notoriously dangerous track that bisects uninhabited stone-covered flats. Out there, under the baking sun, people can die within hours.

He's not far along the road when a distraught young woman stumbles from the scrub and flags him down. A journalist from Sydney, she has just escaped the clutches of an inexplicable, terrifying creature.

Now this desert-dwelling creature has her jeep. Her axe. And her scent . . .

Fear Is the Rider is a nail-biting chase into the outback, towards the devil lurking at its centre. Previously unpublished, the manuscript of this 1980s novella was recently discovered among Kenneth Cook's papers.

Wake In Fright was made into a film in 1971, arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia. Lost for many years, the restored film was screened in 2009 at New York's Film Forum and at Cannes, winning rave reviews in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Nick Cave called it "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence."