#WinterChills ‘The Hunted’ by Gabriel Bergmoser

About the book…

Where does the adventure end . . .
and the nightmare begin?

Frank owns a service station on a little-used highway. His granddaughter, Allie, is sent to stay with him for the summer, but they don’t talk a lot.

Simon is a dreamer and an idealist, in thrall to the romance of the open road and desperately in search of something.

Maggie is the woman who will bring them together, someone whose own personal journey will visit unimaginable terror on them all. . .

‘With echoes of Deliverance and Battle Royale, the Australian outback-set The Hunted is a truly terrifying, breathlessly exciting novel. It gut-punches you in the first few pages and doesn’t let you recover until the final, thrilling climax. An extraordinary book.’ M. W. CRAVEN

I am so excited to talk quite loudly, and fervently, about the debut novel by Gabriel Bergmoser, ‘The Hunted’, kindly sent to me by publishers Faber.

As a mood reader, it is sometimes a while after a book arrives in the house that I am responsive to picking it up, and it just really threw itself at me lately and I drowned in it for a weekend of horror, intrigue, suspense and damned fine storytelling.

Initially it gives off massive Texas Chainsaw vibes-you have the isolated setting, purposefully chosen by Frank, the central character, as a way to avoid people and remove the potential for confrontation as a scarred war veteran with a past that is hinted at. As Frank is the lynchpin, his petrol station is kind of the last stop for civilisation (that is a very loose reading of that word) and the last resort for his granddaughter whose arguing parents feel could benefit from spending time with a relative she barely knows.

Into this tense and sparse landscape of a man with little words and a girl who keeps herself close comes a woman, bloody and injured, in desperate need of help. But she is not the one they need to be fearful of, it is those who are hot on her trail who engender dread ….

Add in some hapless bystanders, a siege between this motley crew and the outsiders, and you have this thrilling sense of danger, that anyone is able to be killed and an undeniable atmosphere of peril where you do not know who, if any, of the characters will get out alive.

the notion of being hunted is so succinctly explored through themes of belonging, identity and colonicalism all against this arid backdrop where life and death are a fingernail width away from each other.

This, the novel posits, is what happens when society abandons those it used to need, what happens when towns dry up and the strictures which form what we understand to be our social conscience are stripped away. But this rule breaking and sense of living outside of society’s laws works both ways as the wheels come off the plot thick and fast exploding (literally) into showers of blood, gore, and the most horrifying ‘family’ set up I can recall in recent times, that puts so much into context. Especially the theme of what it means to ‘hunt’ and even those who are trying to be left alone, like Frank, are hunting solitude, Maggie, the injured girl is hunting for sanctuary, Allie, Frank’s granddaughter, is looking for a sense of where she fits in her family, and the couple dragged into this mess are after a meaningful experience as non-Australian natives.

The ones who are actually hunting, the people local to the area, are the ones who firmly and sincerely know who they are and what their roles are in the hunt, with an unshakeable sense of self-importance built on their abandonment by an indifferent society.

It works on so many levels as the narrative flips from hunter to hunted and the lines between each side blur, and I completely loved the dynamism of the plot, the overlying arc of Maggie’s journey and am very much looking forward to reading the second book , ‘The Inheritance’

Thank again to the wonderful people at Faber for my gifted review copy, I would mightily encourage lovers of darker fiction to pick up a copy if they can.

About the author…

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. He won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award in 2015, was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing and went on to win several awards at the 2017 VDL One Act Play Festival circuit.

In 2016 his first young adult novel, ‘Boone Shepard’, was shortlisted for the Readings Young Adult Prize. His first novel for adults, The Hunted (HarperCollins, Faber, 2020) is a bestseller and a film adaptation of The Hunted is currently being developed in a joint production between Stampede Ventures and Vertigo entertainment in Los Angeles.

Links-https://www.gabrielbergmoser.com/

You can listen to Gabe talking all things Hunted with Neil at Talking Scared Podcast here.

Very very highly recommended, other platforms than Spotify also host this pod, and Neil’s show notes are fab for tracking down books mentioned in each episode.

Twitter @gobergmoser @FaberBooks