A quotation from one of the twenty-one stories might serve as signature for the whole: ‘I’d read about the V2s. They were whispering death. You never heard them coming till it was too late.’ Whispering death. The humour of these narratives is needle-sharp and black, with human society depicted as being lost: ‘Things are already worse than previous worst-case predictions.’ The narratives are interested in the ‘darker forms of human conduct’ such as murder–suicide; children who choose to have their limbs amputated in order to make them feel special; mysterious babies who materialise on doorsteps.

The tone of the book is infused with a firm and deadly formality. The collection enacts a disturbing world refashioned from the everyday by the mind and language of the author. The location is an Australia you may not quite recognise – then again, you might find yourself nodding nervously as you see and hear ordinary things. But that would be before you paused in horror, took a deep breath, uttered a bewildered laugh, and swallowed your tongue. Inversion of the commonplace, twisting of readers’ expectations – these techniques are fundamental to the project. Throughout there runs the notion of ‘some greater force of necessity’; and you only see ‘the point of no return’ after it has passed.

In ‘Swimming Across the Rip’, a study in time and perception, Jon is on a journey to a mythical ‘Timboolya’, which is a ‘fuckin’ long way’ from anywhere. His train is mysteriously delayed, and he has already learnt that ‘information doesn’t always inform’. The reader sympathises with Jon and is gradually sucked in, like Jon himself. In a bar he encounters Noel, an ursine man – bears being something of a motif throughout – who has a rough ginger beard and a beer gut. He offers Jon a lift in his truck; having come so far and waited so long, he accepts. If you want fear, uncertainty, unease, you have it. As a worn-out cassette of Cat Stevens plays, and the driver sings along, Jon observes a landscape ‘as flat and lifeless as any you’d find in this corner of the universe’.

Why is Jon so desperate to get to Timboolya? The reader is not privy to this information. They stop for a drink in Bilyup, with its café and three ancient petrol bowsers. Conversation always reverts to mortality. The reader is sure Noel is going to kill Jon, but must endure the ugly suspense. Jon’s hopes are focused on reaching Timboolya, a good place to start if you want to see death, he is assured. Noel suggests that if an alien wanted a disguise, it would take on the characteristics of Noel himself. This conversation is the one that frightens Jon the most. The dénouement turns this story on its head. Early in the story, Jon wonders what good sense could mean any more; it turns out that in this case wisdom lay in the abandonment of good sense.

The narrator of ‘The True Nation’ is travelling by train in an unnamed country that is a kind of Australia, but here the trains are incredibly clean. The people are proud and modest; they turn out in droves as volunteers to wash the walls of railway tunnels, for although travellers will not see the walls, they will imagine them, and the walls need to live up to imagination. The potency of the imagination is all-important. Visitors are forbidden to leave the trains. The narrator’s map doesn’t correspond to the State Rail map he is shown on the train. Disorientation and destabilisation are created here with an eerie confidence. The traveller is told that once he has experienced the capital he will never want to travel again. There is no single word for generosity, just this saying: ‘The true gift doesn’t know its shadow.’ The question remains: where was this dystopia through which the narrator travelled?

The collection closes with a short piece ironically titled ‘Future Perfect’, invoking the future perfect tense whereby you will have been if you know what’s good for you. Suburban couples living with a sense of the end of civilisation realise that it is only a matter of time before the world is at war over ‘water, fish or fuel’. If it wasn’t for the fact that they have children, they would ‘party up and pass around the Kool Aid’. Sometimes an apparent glimpse of beautiful nostalgia breaks through, so that, as the story ends, a couple pauses to watch ‘a beige moon-sliver tease the motionless bay’. As they kiss, in a parody of happy-ever-after, there is in the sky an orange glow that ‘would grow strident by the time it finally caught their attention’. Is it sunrise or something more sinister? The couple have the answer. They simply say, with the economy that characterises these stories: ‘We’re so fucked.’ ‘Mmm. Totally.’

This is a striking and powerful collection.