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12 stories that orbit like a solar system round a centre of horror in the form of an Australian serial killer. I remember someone once summarised the movie Rosemary’s Baby by saying “you don’t get to see it�� and in Highway Thirteen you don’t get anywhere near the crimes or the criminal himself. Instead you get the feelings of a comedian turned actor who’s playing the murderer in a movie, a transcript of a podcast about the case, a woman who lived across the street from the murderer being interviewed by the author of the book about the case on the day the house is finally torn down, you get the idea. Ripples in a pond. The only one that misfired for me was called “Democracy Sausage�� and is one of those kind-of-single-ultralong-sentences that last ten pages, writers like to do that sometimes. It gave me a severe flashback to the time I tried to read Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. Oh the pain, the pain. Make it stop.

Aside from that a very tasty very sinister collection.