We return to Australia for the second time in a month, to find that (once again), home invasion isn’t the worst thing to happen on a typical day.
Alan Baxter’s Blood Covenant is a violent, thrilling story of a threeway battle between an innocent family, a nasty criminal gang of bogans (see, I’m learning!) and an otherworldly force that is even worse! Think, what if The Strangers took place in the Overlook Hotel.
It’s a hugely enjoyable book that prompts a conversation about the influence of 70s and 80s paperback classics, the overlap of horror and crime in Australian fiction, some extreme horror movies and a whole long celebration of unpretentious storytelling.
Enjoy!
Blood Covenant is released May 24th from Cemetary Dance
Other books mentioned:
- The Gulp (2021), by Alan Baxter
- Hidden City (2018), by Alan Baxter
- The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (1986), by Robert Hughes
- “Devil” by Glen Hirshberg, in Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous (2022), edited by Ellen Datlow
- The Fog (1975), by James Herbert
- The Hunted (2021), by Gabriel Bergmoser
- Terra Nullius (2017), by Claire G. Coleman
- Dirty Heads (2021), by Aaron Dries
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