Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook: Outback monsters from Wake in Fright author

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Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook: Outback monsters from Wake in Fright author

A simple plot drives Fear is the Rider, a classic chase between the hunter and the hunted.

By Jacqueline Kent
Updated

Fiction

Fear Is the Rider

Author Kenneth Cook liked to portray the outback as a place of menace and death.

Author Kenneth Cook liked to portray the outback as a place of menace and death.

Kenneth Cook

Text Publishing, $19.99

<i>Fear Is the Rider</i>, by Kenneth Cook.

Fear Is the Rider, by Kenneth Cook.

Kenneth Cook didn't go in for highly elaborate plots, and the story of Fear Is the Rider could hardly be simpler. John Shaw, driving from Sydney to Adelaide, meets freelance photographer Katie Alton. Both are 20-something city dwellers from moneyed families. She is going down the rough and inaccessible Obiri Track and he decides to follow her, even though he knows his small Honda is no match for her Land Cruiser. He is in the middle of the desert track surrounded by nothingness when Katie, utterly terrified, bursts out of the scrub and waves him down. She has just escaped from a huge feral creature, a man with an axe who is trying to kill her. Shaw rescues her and before long the monster is after him too – in Katie's Land Cruiser.

That's basically it. The novel is a classic chase between hunter and hunted. The sheer pace of the narrative takes over and you read on simply to find out what will happen next, whether the couple can possibly escape from the horror pursuing them. Sure there are a couple of spots where features of the landscape seem to turn up mostly to add a couple of twists to the plot – the hapless couple stumble upon an abandoned opal mine and are caught in a sandstorm – but the suspense of the whole story is handled so expertly that you accept them. You can read Fear Is the Rider in one sitting; this is a story that takes you by the throat and doesn't let go till the end.

We never find out why this horrifying feral creature is intent on murder, nor do we learn much about the hunted couple, but those things do not matter greatly. This is a novel of pure action. It started life as an unproduced TV play that Cook converted into a novel a few years before he died in 1987, and its origins are obvious: minimal dialogue, quick cutting between scenes, stripped-down descriptive language, pinpoint accuracy of observation. Like the kangaroo shoot section of Wake in Fright, parts of this novel read like a shot list. Cook was a highly visual writer who knew exactly what details to emphasise for best dramatic effect, and he wrote sentences with the kind of clarity that shows exactly what he wanted readers to see.

Much of the power of Fear Is the Rider comes from Cook's treatment of his outback setting. As in most of his novels, the landscape and climate are unremittingly hostile to humans, especially to city dwellers. The stone-covered desert and the power of the sun can be lethal: when John Shaw gets out of the car the 50-degree heat he feels "as though someone had thrown a bucket of dry hot water" onto his body; the desert stones are deadly missiles.

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Setting city dwellers against the malevolence of the outback was something of a Cook speciality. It was the engine of his first novel Wake in Fright, and it occurs in other novels. At the end of his life he revisited the theme for comic effect in the Killer Koala stories, which deal with man versus Australia's native animals.

Strongly present in much of Cook's work – here as elsewhere -- is the presence of evil in Australia's remote places. Fear Is the Rider was probably written after Cook's 1980 novel Pig, in which the murderous force was a wild boar, a huge creature determined to destroy simply because it could. In Fear Is the Rider the horror seems to be some emanation of the landscape; at one point the characters come across some Aboriginal spirit carvings, one of which looks just like whatever is pursuing the couple.

This is probably not the best of Cook's novels – The Man Underground has more nuanced characters, and of course there's Wake in Fright – but it shares the power of his best writing. Once he was asked why he wrote so much about the bush; he replied, "I'm an Australian writer. What else would I write about?" Whether you agree with this or not, few have written better about the unknowable Australian landscape than Kenneth Cook did.

Jacqueline Kent is an award-winning biographer who was briefly married to Kenneth Cook.

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