Thrill Seekers

Thrill Seekers is a good novel. It isn’t a nice novel, and it certainly isn’t a fun novel, but it’s the kind of novel that grabs you by the front of your coat and shakes you around a bit before dropping you just as suddenly. The premise is simple: the protagonists’ father is dead and in order to deal with that there’s going to have to be a whole lot of drinking, smoking and drugging. Luckily, Brian and Douggie Spencer are the boys for the job. Unluckily? Douggie has started hearing voices, and everything looks like it’s about to go down the creek and fast.

And there are a lot of creeks. It’s set in an existentialist Brisbane, where the youth have no purpose and nothing but time. The pacing is excellent, the characters are believable, the grit is gritty. The chapters-as-vignettes approach works well. The only major issue arises from the inclusion of a third narrator, Beck: an enjoyable character but not really a protagonist. Shaw gives her very little agency and her chapters suffer for it. Don’t worry though, it’s not the end of the world, since the prose is consistently excellent: unfussy, but with a rare liveliness and spring to it which could save almost any meandering scene.

This is for fans of (or an introduction to) McCabe’s Butcher Boy and E.M. Reapy’s Red Dirt. Depression, addiction, faith and love are all thrown in the pot and discussed frankly by Shaw, as well as severe mental illness – the book is dedicated to her brother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He died aged twenty. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not for the squeamish, Thrill Seekers is a bloody, harrowing, all-Australian tale which is well worth grappling with.

 Luke Power