Gabriel Bergmoser’s The Hunted is billed as ‘Wake in Fright meets Jack Reacher’

If Gabriel Bergmoser’s The Hunted does become a movie, it will be MA15+ and then some.

Gabriel Bergmoser, author of The Hunted

‘‘Maybe his best course of action was to go back to the city. ... He laughed bitterly. The real Australia. What a stupid f..king idea. As if he had any idea what that would even look like.”

That’s Simon, a Melbourne-based honours student who has decided to take a solo trip into the outback to broaden his horizons. He’s just stepped out of his clapped-out station wagon into a much different Australia. Whether it’s the real Australia is something readers of Gabriel Bergmoser’s dark, disturbing novel, The Hunted, can think about and discuss.

Bergmoser is 28 and from Melbourne. The founder of independent theatre group Bitten By Productions, he is an exciting young voice in Australian literature, having written a handful of successful plays, including The Trial of Dorian Gray and The Beatles riff We Can Work It Out, and a well-received young adult fiction trilogy centred on journalist cum private investigator Boone Shepard. You can read more about him at www.gabrielbergmoser.com

The Hunted (HarperCollins, 267pp, $29.99), his first adult novel, is generating a lot of buzz. It’s been optioned by a US-based film production company and the author is writing the script. The novel is billed as ‘‘Wake in Fright meets Jack Reacher”. I see half of that hook-up, as it is set in an town in the middle of nowhere into which non-locals wander.

Yet while Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright is centred on a city schoolteacher who walks into a psychological and sexual minefield, The Hunted is more direct, more visceral, more blood and guts. It is a cracking read, a one-sitting suspenseful page-turner. If I had to do the matchmaking, I’d say it’s Wake in Fright meets the 2012 Australian film 100 Bloody Acres, starring Damon Herriman and Angus Sampson, or the more recent American movie The Hunt, in which a smug clique of elites hunt — with rifles — a bunch of “deplorables”.

Bergmoser’s set-up is terrific. We first meet Frank, a bloke with a “post-fifty gut” running a service station-roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. The nearest towns are hours away. He’s been there for a decade, he lives alone and it’s clear he has run from something in his past. His solitary life is upset when his 14-year-old granddaughter, Allie, comes to stay while her parents work out their marital difficulties.

We next meet two young English backpackers, Charlie and Delilah, who stop at the roadhouse for supplies. Then we meet Simon and then he meets, in a town pub, Maggie, an attractive, bold 20-something who talks straight and drinks neat vodka. She tells Simon he looks a bit like Jack Kerouac and he, a few drinks in, decides she should join him on the road. She agrees and adds: “Just remember. Kerouac died young.”

The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser

There’s one other outsider we need to know about: Greg, an uppity white-collar executive who also stops at the roadhouse. All of them — Frank, Allie, Charlie, Delilah, Simon, Maggie and Greg — are drawn into a life or death confrontation with the people from a remote town. The spark for this is Simon and Maggie stopping there soon after they hit the road together. Simon is reluctant to join the locals for beer and burnt barbecued meat, but Maggie is nonchalant. Simon bucks up his courage. “They’re just country blokes,” he tells himself.

Bergmoser draws the locals compellingly. There is that Wake in Fright-like mix of good cheer, beer, sexual banter and menace. He also takes us into the lives of the outsiders. As their backstories emerge, the division between hunter and hunted blurs.

I’m not going to reveal what happens but the final two-thirds of the novel, when the locals and outsiders move past the point of no return, is riveting. The blurb from Bookseller+Publisher is spot on: this book is a “savage Rottweiler” that will clamp its jaws around readers’ throats and “shake them to the end”. A real dog, Blue, does have an important role in the novel, as does a shed, this being an Australian horror tale.

I’m not sure this is a book for everyone. Some readers may simply find it too gruesome. If it does become a movie, it will be MA15+ and then some. I also wonder, in these culturally anxious times, if Australians in general and rural Australians in particular will take offence at the country and people portrayed. Here’s Charlie on the Australia he has seen: “One thing he’d learned about Australia — it was full of different variants of a certain kind of guy who was fixated on belittlement and condescension, especially when there was a girl involved.”

In this sense, it’s important to remember that it is a just work of fiction, a world made up in Bergmoser’s head. The fact Jack Thompson shot kangaroos in Ted Kotcheff’s film of Wake in Fright doesn’t mean, to continue the comparison, that all Jack Thompsons shoot kangaroos. Bergmoser is at work on a sequel. He doesn’t need me to wish him luck, but I want to anyway.