By Emma Young
FICTION
King of Dirt
Holden Sheppard
Pantera Press, $34.99
Brash, bolshy and bold, Western Australia’s Holden Sheppard has created a layered and pitch-perfect anti-hero in his latest work, a seasoned and confident novel that traces one of humanity’s deepest yearnings: the desire to belong.
Sheppard was born in the rural town of Geraldton on the state’s Mid West coast, and now lives in Perth. His debut young adult novel Invisible Boys was adapted for a Stan original series this year after winning the WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer and being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. His second book, The Brink (2022) won two Indie Book Awards.
Holden Sheppard’s King of Dirt is out June 3. Credit: Pantera Press
King of Dirt is his first novel aimed at adults, and follows Giacomo Brolo, aka Jack, whose life is a mess. He’s a closeted gay alcoholic, who has been estranged from his family since his teens, and is working piecemeal construction gigs in remote WA. Jack’s consumed with shame and self-loathing, but is functioning, more or less – until he gets a wedding invitation from his home town of Geraldton.
Against his better judgment, Jack returns and ignites an emotional firestorm. Back home, he finds a lost love who would prefer he left the closet, and a traditional Italian family that wants him to stay firmly in. Then a fresh bombshell drops, hitting 10x on the complications scale and forcing Jack to face an impossible choice.
This is a story about the hard-won recognition that to gain love and connection, other things must sometimes be lost – and that to choose such sacrifices takes both bravery and support.
Like Sheppard’s earlier novels, it depicts friendships and explores the concept of the found family, and is unafraid in evoking the darkness that awaits human beings continually denied love and self-expression.
A raw undercurrent of longing runs through the novel: for the past, for youth and simplicity, for companionship and acceptance, both from society and the self. The scenes of Jack yearning for his teenage friendships, and for a long-gone sense of comradeship with his father, are among King of Dirt‘s most powerfully realised.
Sheppard continues his tradition of capitalising on the dramatic potential of ritualised milestone occasions such as hens’ and bucks’ nights, weddings, family dinners, Italian pasta-making rituals and Leavers/Schoolies week in The Brink.
Sheppard clearly relishes such heightened occasions as much for the feeling of anticipation, warmth and celebration they can evoke as for the set pieces of scandal, tension and drama they devolve somewhat deliciously into when his more villainous characters cannot control their various homophobias, control manias, unreasonable expectations and occasionally violent impulses (a word of warning: this is not a book for those put off by strong language, themes or sex scenes).
They offset some of the darker passages, their lead-ups making the reader gleefully aware that the proverbial is about to hit the fan – and so it does. Scenes of truly delicious, extended, hair-raising drama crown this book, in a way that makes the reader comfortably thankful they’re only a fly on the wall.
Supporting characters conform to type to a degree (the emotionally closed-off father, the spectacularly controlling mother) but are never one-dimensional, and Sheppard strikes a delicate balance in achieving a triumphant sense of closure and coming-of-age for his character, while simultaneously conceding that life is not neat, some relationships cannot surmount their problems and some people will never get past their prejudices.
Fast pacing and nicely layered subplots add to, rather than detract from, the main narrative drive, with Easter eggs for return readers taking the form of embedded references to Sheppard’s previous titles, capitalising on the books’ similar and fully realised settings along the coast north of Perth.
No other contemporary Australian fiction writer is evoking this particular working-class demographic. Sheppard is maturing and owning this self-carved niche in his best book yet: frank, fast, funny and fearless.
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