While fully deserved, the attention paid to Wake In Fright overshadows the broader achievements of Cook's life. Before he died of a heart attack in 1987 at the age of fifty-seven, Cook had been a journalist, screenwriter, film director, amateur lepidopterist, and failed candidate for federal parliament, as well as the author of twenty-one books, including fifteen novels, most of which remain unknown and out of print. (Jacqueline Kent, his widow, wrote about Cook in the November 2009 issue of ABR.)

The main characters in Fear Is the Rider, Katie Alton and John Shaw,  are city people whose paths cross in an outback pub, where they pause on their respective journeys. She is a freelance photographer there to shoot images of Aboriginal rock paintings located off an isolated track. Though Shaw is travelling from Sydney to Adelaide for a job interview, a flicker of attraction is enough for him to decide to follow her. As he approaches the turn-off to the track, Katie runs out of the scrub, having barely escaped a stranger who tried to rape and kill her. 'A man ...' she tells him. 'I think ... yes, a man, wild, a savage ... a dreadful man ...'

'The Man', as he is referred to thenceforth, appears soon after, hurtling from the scrub in Katie's Land Cruiser. We aren't told anything about him – not even what he looks like. The Man is mostly seen silhouetted against the sun, viewed through smoke from a fire, as a dark figure in the night, his presence often signified by a distant plume of dust thrown up by the speeding Land Cruiser. All we know is that he is intent on killing them both.

Kenneth Cook

That Cook can sustain this slim narrative and inject it with suspense is evidence of his skill as a writer. His clear, confident prose evocatively describes the Man's relentless pursuit of his quarry across the desert and their alternating responses of fear, hopelessness, and resistance, as well as additional hardships of the terrain. The rocky tracks, the heat, the shifting sands, and the dust storms are as menacing as the killer.

The book also speaks to the enduring power of the trope of the unknown man (and it is always a man) who decides, for no rational reason, to hunt another human. Fear Is the Rider eerily prefigures the critically assailed but commercially successful 2005 Australian horror film Wolf Creek, which is about three young backpackers who find themselves hunted by a serial killer in remote Western Australia. Another example of this trope is the movie Duel (1971), in which a mild-mannered salesman becomes the target of a homicidal truck driver on a remote desert highway. Going back further is The Most Dangerous Game (1932), based on a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, about a man shipwrecked on a Caribbean Island where a deranged aristocrat hunts him.

Wake in Fright, Text Classics edition

Like the stranded teacher in Wake In Fright, Shaw and Katie are propelled into territory where their cultural capital and skills are useless. Despite this, civilisation stubbornly clings to them, making them hesitant to return violence with violence.

The theme of the outback as a place bereft of civilisation, full of violence and alienation, is explored in a number of Cook's books. His second novel, Chain of Darkness (1962), also set in the outback, portrays a small-time criminal who becomes the subject of a police manhunt after accidentally killing a policeman. The Man Underground (1977) depicts a rough opal-mining town from the perspective of a divorced, depressed, alcoholic miner. Pig (1980) concerned the hunt for an enormous wild pig – 'a manifestation of pure evil with an unearthly ability to hate, to plot, to revenge itself', according to the back cover of the paperback – a story remarkably similar to the Ozsploitation film Razorback (1984).

Fear Is the Rider confirms Cook as an accomplished thriller writer and a skilled purveyor of Australian gothic. It is a timely reminder of his literary output, a body of work largely under-appreciated and ripe for rediscovery.