An entrancing synthesis of the thriller and detective genres, Darkwater contains not only shocking murder, but also the traditionally gripping noir element of suspense. We do not know if the narrator will reach the end of the story alive. Set in 1973, in an Australian riverside community, the narrative opens with the discovery of the body of drowned schoolgirl Amanda Clarke and the investigation of the crime through the reactions of the town’s inhabitants. As one character comments, ‘death … ripples out. It’s a stain that spreads, touching us all.’

Fifteen-year-old Winter’s narration of the murder and its investigation (the official police inquiry alongside her own search for answers) is told through recounted observations, imagined scenes, and snatches of diary and journal entries. As she attempts to assimilate the loss of a schoolmate and the possible prosecution of several of the suburb’s young men, including her own brother, Joe, Winter becomes morbidly fascinated by Amanda, who is surrounded by sordid mystery in death as much as she was in life. Convinced that the police are misled, Winter pieces together facts and speculations from overheard conversations and produces her own explanation of the killing by listening at doors and windows, hiding on landings, at the peripheries of the adult world.

Throughout the narrative, summer becomes as important to the story as Winter. Blain’s dazzling sensory descriptions of the oppressive heat and humidity of the Australian bush take on a powerful force, as imperative as the crime and the searching voice of the narrator. Following the murder, everything in the town is tinged with images of decay: ‘Amanda’s death made everything feel strange … ants inking a broken black line ... milk in the bottle … thickened in the heat’; and bats ‘swept down on the rotten fruit’. The riverbank, formerly the children’s playground during halcyon afternoons, is similarly imbued with fear and malevolence, conveyed by Blain’s poetic images of the natural world that are increasingly tinged with foreboding: ‘burnt grass whipping our ankles like paper cuts’; a ‘deep rush of inky water, black under the heavy night sky’; ‘a long, dark bruise wrapped around the peninsula’.

Set against a background of social concerns pertinent to the early 1970s, such as debates over the rise of feminism, Darkwater appropriately and refreshingly positions a young female in the traditionally male role, as investigator at the centre of a disturbing crime. The hothouse of the narrative is also broken by the inclusion of other secondary conflicts, such as a neighbourhood dispute over a local luxury housing construction, which itself takes a sinister and violent turn.

Blain’s narrative, with its ‘coming-of-age’ elements, subscribes to the tradition of detective stories in which the opening scene of the murder gives way to the character’s literal insight regarding the crime, but also to greater self-knowledge. Winter’s obsession with Amanda’s gruesome death and her awakening desire for skater, Nicky Blackwell, gradually combine in the crucible of summer. Winter’s thoughts are ‘all colliding with each other in a confused tangle’ as she becomes more personally involved in the investigation than anticipated, finding herself in peril during a riveting dénouement that is not without twists.

Like Winter, Hall’s Wildgirl, the young woman at the centre of This is Shyness, finds herself submerged in an investigative journey, one in which she too bravely encounters the potential of real danger.

What begins as an unremarkable afternoon becomes Wildgirl’s very eventful night as ‘a tourist to the dark side’ when she meets the enigmatic Wolfboy at the Diabetic Hotel. Together they become embroiled in a quest to retrieve some stolen goods in Wolfboy’s neighbouring county, Shyness, where the sun has mysteriously stopped rising, leaving streets shrouded in the permanent Darkness. Wildgirl feels ‘like an unwilling participant in someone’s performance art’ with Wolfboy, her only ‘lifebuoy in this strange place’ which is populated by a blend of post-apocalyptic colonies. Following the descent of the Darkness, human beings have evolved into Dreamers, Ghostniks, Necroheads, and part-animal hybrids, all living in fear of the Kidds, a gang of pushbike-mounted, sugar-addicted thieves, who live in a rundown housing project known as Orphanville, with an army of Tarsier monkeys.

Soon, Wildgirl joins a long list of literary heroines unable to resist the allure of the tall, dark, handsome, and mysteriously troubled stranger whose sometimes volatile behaviour provides a magnetic element of risk. Descriptions of burgeoning attraction and episodes of physical intimacy between the pair are gritty, yet sensual and evocative. To Wolfboy, Wildgirl ‘smells of vanilla and beer … I’m going to lick her, from the crook of her neck up to her ear’. Similarly, dynamic scenes of violent action during confrontations with the Kidds are rendered deftly.

Hall humorously borrows from classical mythology and fairytale. Wolfboy speculates that the Darkness has fallen because Apollo is ‘striking for better pay’, and Wildgirl’s allusions to Little Red Riding Hood (‘my mother always told me not to go back to wolves’ lairs’) are witty and engaging. In places, though, the narrative seems incomplete; some scenes are rendered more vividly than others, and several of the more compelling and unique characters such as Blake, Lupe and Ortalon, while significant in propelling the plot, make only fleeting appearances, leaving the reader with a sense of unsatisfied intrigue.

Similarly, Hall has made an enlivening choice to shift between the two characters’ first-person narration from chapter to chapter, yet the voices of Wildgirl and Wolfboy are barely distinguishable. Perhaps a starker contrast of tone between their two perspectives, from either side of the Darkness, could have made this a more interesting juxtaposition, one used to emphasise the differences, thus highlighting the points of similarity between them to greater effect. For it is both characters’ attempts to forget personal trauma that bonds them to each other and also perhaps to the adolescent reader. Wildgirl’s schoolyard bullies’ use of ‘psychological warfare’ and cyber bullying techniques is a pertinent theme in the lives of contemporary teenagers.

Reading this book is, as Wildgirl says of entering Shyness, ‘what it feels like to be in a foreign country: confused and excited and unsure all at the same time’. Hall has created a fantastical world, with frightening elements of the surreal in her portrayal of bleak, industrial landscapes. Her prose is spiked with original, violent metaphors (Wildgirl is ‘a grenade with the pin pulled out’), but overall the novel is a perplexing experience. The somewhat abrupt ending, in which both main characters are left in abeyance. hints very much at a sequel; but if there is to be none, too many questions are left unanswered.