The Butcherbird Stories incorporates a novella, ‘Among the Ruins’, which appears to be the previously published Bruno Kamzer: A Long Story (2013). It is a strange tale, reminiscent of nineteenth-century remakes of traditional European folk tales – or, more recently, Christina Stead’s The Salzburg Tales (1974). The protagonist is a professional rogue, and the story details numerous sadistic jobs carried out by Bruno and his fellow thugs. Bruno turns out, in the end, to be one of the men who come for Kafka’s Josef K. But where the feelings of malevolence and fear in Kafka’s novel The Trial come from the victim’s perspective, here they derive from the perspective of these perpetrators of violence.

All the stories in this collection are violent and sinister. They feature bashings, dismemberment, dissociative states, drugged and nightmare visions, murders (at least three), a suicide attempt, and several fatal car crashes. The focal characters and narrators are all male, and they enact, observe, and sometimes themselves suffer this violence.

The title story, ‘Butcherbird’, is the least direct about violence but offers some reflection on this central theme. A man and his small daughter, on holidays in north Queensland, are out walking when they observe some birds: an aggressive magpie and a flock of butcherbirds that chatter and sing. He observes that the child is not afraid of the magpie, ‘looking at the malevolent creature as though she doesn’t even have the beginnings of a thought or feeling about a threatening bird’. At the same time, he marvels at the perfection of the butcherbirds’ instinctive song, their ‘delicate crescendo’. Cut to that night: at the resort pool he has a brief, almost-flirtatious conversation with a young girl who is ‘play-acting with her new body … with a safe man she’s seen around the resort’. Here is a second young female who lacks the necessary fear of aggression. Back in the apartment, his daughter is having a nightmare about the butcherbirds invading her room. He reassures her that this is not so and tells her: ‘the butcherbird was the songbird, despite the nasty name’. Their song is like the art of these stories – singing prose at the service, often, of violent and malevolent images and actions.

A.S. PatrićThis fascination with violence and threat is characteristic of Patrić’s writing. In Black Rock, White City, readers are afforded some distance from the malevolent words and deeds that appear mysteriously everywhere – at least until the novel’s denouement. Amid all that darkness, there is a central love story being told, and humour as well. But these stories offer no such distance: experience is compressed into crisis points, and humour is rare.

The stories have few specific references to place and time, although visual and aural imagery are strong. Characters act without apparent motivation. In such bare contexts, the violence that strikes from the page appears as an incursion of sheer unmotivated evil. Black Rock, White City allowed a reading that could attribute the fear and menace to the traumatised central characters, a Serbian couple who migrated to Australia after suffering torture and terrible loss. The stories offer no such empathetic imaginative engagement, unless you are a reader who enjoys the scary stuff (writing this review at Halloween, I’m reminded that many people do). Yet I admire Patrić’s writing and his desire to stretch language and make it work in non-realist directions.

The title ‘Dead Sun’ alludes to a song by the heavy metal band Thy Art Is Murder, dramatising its sinister lyrics to horrific effect, to enact the punning meaning of the title phrase. A nameless man, suffering from an unexplained, severe bashing and using morphine to assuage the pain, stays in the attic room of a suburban house belonging to an old couple. He knows, somehow, that this room belonged to their dead son. The story ends with an unmotivated murder.

Patrić’s writing looks back to Dostoyevsky and Kafka, to stories of individuals caught by their own capacity for murderous violence, or by the impersonal malevolence of power. And it looks forwards, with the dark arts of the present, towards the chaos to come. The hinge between these two states of being is evoked in the story ‘Punctuated Air’, where the Patrić-like narrator remembers his boyhood passion for science-fiction stories and their ‘breaks with reality’. He recalls the moon landing, imagines those men gazing back ‘at our bubble. A planet where everything was named and there was an endless generation of stories. It was a moment in which the future seemed to open up and allow each of us daydreams of infinite possibility.’

This is one of the more grounded stories in the collection, set among immigrant families of the 1970s in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, ‘a rubble of homes that were waiting for the foundation concrete to dry’. They were the ‘jet immigrants’, dropped suddenly into a new world where ‘histories fell to the ground – thousands of broken fragments’ (Serbian, in Patrić’s case). Their children grew up into a language that was not their parents’. For a writer, being dedicated to a literary legacy ‘in which your ancestors have never belonged creates a separation within your mind and seems to say: before you, there is nothing’. This sense of isolation is intensified by the perceived erasure of the original civilisation of the country, the Indigenous belief ‘that it was a vast shared soul’. ‘Punctuated Air’ goes a long way towards illuminating the discontinuities, and the violence and threat, which are the dom inant tones in The Butcherbird Stories.