Author Gabriel Bergmoser reveals why his new thriller The Hunted almost never happened
It’s a uniquely Australian story that immediately drew the attention of Hollywood. But The Hunted is one disturbing road trip that almost never was.
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What lies at the end of those windy dirt roads you pass while driving through the more desolate parts of Australia? Those eerie, untrodden paths that disappear into a taunting, dusty horizon.
They’re the types of places that make films such as Wolf Creek and Razorback so terrifying and bring true crime horror stories such as the outback murder of backpacker Peter Falconio to the front of mind.
A fascination with that question was the driving force behind The Hunted, a cracking, edge-of-your-seat novel from young Australian author Gabriel Bergmoser who imagined the dangers that could lie at the end of those tracks.
“Coupled with stories from friends of mine who were brave enough to do the Jack Kerouac road trip I was never brave enough to do despite all my teenage instances, it all kind of compounded into this fascination with the bad places of Australia,” Bergmoser, 28, says.
“The places that you find at the end of those roads, the places that have been left to fester and to turn dangerous and to stagnate and what isolation can do to a particular brand of Australian masculinity left alone too long.”
The Hunted is set in an unnamed but recognisable part of Australia, a little travelled highway where Frank, owns a run-down roadhouse with nothing but grasslands for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.
When Maggie, badly injured and close to death, rolls into the isolated post and stumbles from her car, it kick starts a fight for survival from a group she is running from — a group who live at the end of one of those dirt roads and have a secret that must be kept at all costs.
It’s a fast-paced survival tale that doesn’t relent until the final pages, a unique – but strangely familiar – story that immediately drew the attraction of impressive US producers — responsible for movies such as The Ring, The Grudge and It — who snapped up the rights to a manuscript that has ‘franchise’ stamped all over it.
Anti-hero’s arrival Maggie, who is the centre of all that happens in The Hunted, didn’t have a starring role when Bergmoser first started writing the book. But the anti-hero took on a life of her own that he fell in love with.
“Very quickly that beautiful thing that sometimes happens happened and she took over the story — she became the story,” he says.
“The moment I switched to her perspective about halfway through that original short version, I had this overwhelming sense of personality, I was just ‘whoa, who are you?’.”
Maggie is a Jack Reacher-style character, one you will sometimes question your loyalties to.
Bergmoser admits there is just a degree of separation between her and the evil that is chasing her down.
“The only reason she can survive and can succeed is that she has the capacity to be just as monstrous as the people she’s up against,” he says.
“There is part of her that is extraordinarily violent, there is part of her that has this total capacity for destruction, there is part of her that is not only stone cold killer but a willing and relishing killer in some ways and that is terrifying because you sit there and you think ‘should we be on her side?’.”
The Hunted, which grew from a short story he had written years earlier, is one that Bergmoser had all but thrown in the trash.
He was surprised when it started getting positive reviews and gaining traction in the literary world.
“It’s kind of amazing to me that the book has had the response it has had because when I finished writing it I sat there and I was like ‘well alright, I’ve just proved that I can’t write extreme survival thrillers, I’m going to put that in the drawer and forget about it!’,” he laughs.
“It kind of came about at a time when my now agent had passed on a couple of things that I’d sent her that I’d been working on for a lot longer and I ended up sending it to her almost on a whim — it was sort of a Hail Mary and the fact that it’s been picked up is incredible to me.”
The book is a departure from the work that Bergmoser had produced up until that point — he has written numerous plays and a well-received series of young adult novels — but one look at the picture of him at 14 joyfully reading a Quentin Tarantino biography, and it’s obvious this was never going to be a stretch.
The American filmmaker is a big influence on this young author and screenwriter, as are the likes of Thomas Harris, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri writer and director Martin McDonagh and Australian author John Marsden.
While Bergmoser, who had written a novella that was basically “Psycho and Silence Of The Lambs mashed together” by the age of 13, had a love of writing from a young age, his school years saw him focused on a different career path.
“For most of my high school years I thought I wanted to be an actor, that was what I wanted to do,” he says.
“I was in all the high school plays and I went to (Melbourne’s) Caulfield Grammar on a drama scholarship and that’s what I was pursuing.”
That was until a rather important fact dawned on him.
“I finally had the moment of realisation that I wasn’t a particularly talented actor,” he laughs.