Highway 13: sublime short stories

A serial killer stalks the highway. A new book by one of Australia’s finest writers examines all the ways in which Australian lives are impacted.

Fiona McFarlane explores the ways in which serial killings impact the lives of all in the Australian community.

Fiona McFarlane, lauded for her novels and her short stories, combines her impressive skillset in her latest offering, Highway 13, in which she uses the form of the short story to knit together a narrative connected by the crimes of an enigmatic serial killer.

Although McFarlane’s killer goes by the name of Paul Biga, his crimes bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Ivan Milat. Luring his victims to the Burrow State Forest south of Sydney, we learn in one chapter:

“He killed twelve people between 1990 and 1997. He was a total monster, held them up at gunpoint, drove them into the forest, shot them, stabbed them, assault, all the worst stuff.”

 

Highway 13, named after the road on which Biga finds his victims, weaves back and forth in time, mostly to points during and after the crimes, yet overall the book is more about the emotional echoes of violence than the idea of the killer among us.

In Tourists, the opening story, Lena takes Joe a colleague from “payroll”, into the forest where they discover police tape apparently indicating a new victim. Misunderstood and made fun of at work, Lena is much more resilient and comfortable in her role as the outcast than Joe. She quips at her own expense that “people who live alone” are “all serial killers in the waiting”. Yet it’s Joe’s acute need for acceptance that offers the real source of darkness in the story.

In Hunter on the Highway, May hitchhikes in the area where the (as yet undetected) Biga is known to be active. It gradually becomes clear that May suspects her boyfriend, Darcy, who drives a white utility and works on-site as a landscape gardener, as the killer. McFarlane writes about May’s doubt:

“For minutes at a time she didn’t think of Darcy, but when she did she felt her heart drop. It was a very physical feeling, and it reminded her of falling in love with him.”

McFarlane’s stories often work this way, toward some point of clarity about her character’s emotions, rather than in the unfolding of events.

In Abroad, one of the book’s standouts, Simon, an Englishman in America attends to trick-or-treaters at Halloween with a detached bemusement, until a young, discerning witch who comes to his door disappears.

Fiona McFarlane has written an astonishing book about, and yet not about, a serial killer.

As he walks through the neighbourhood attempting to locate her, he recalls his own sister who went missing while backpacking in Australia. In the years afterwards, Simon’s father spent the evenings wandering their neighbourhood as “a way of honouring his daughter, or looking for her, or just acknowledging that he had let her leave the safety of his house in the first place”. With this gesture his father was able to relocate the loss outside of the family home, but Simon’s encounter on this particular Halloween, when the souls of the dead symbolically return home, brings his deferred feelings of grief suddenly home-to-roost.

Hostess, connected to Biga in only the most peripheral sense, recounts the narrator’s friendship with Jill, a former air-hostess who retires and relocates to a “a gritty little pearl of a town” on the north coast of Western Australia.

Though the charismatic, Jill holds people in her thrall, her life is defined by a central “mistake”. It’s a quietly heartbreaking story, as the narrator moves from his early adulthood into the reality of middle-age where he begins “to see life as a series of losses”. Hostel is similar in tone, about a chance meeting with Swiss backpackers who become Biga’s victims and the way this distant encounter with disaster and the stories they tell about it become a curious hinge-point in these characters’ lives.

McFarlane’s command of form is exceptional, her range spanning contemplative, poignant and playful. The tragicomic Fat Suit, for example, is about an actor who wears a prosthetic body in order to play Biga in his prison years. Podcast mimics a true-crime podcast, in which the tone of the show’s presenters is deeply at odds with the extremity of the crimes they are discussing, turning the question of voyeurism back on itself, as apparently ordinary people are drawn to horrific events.

Absurdities mount in Democracy Sausage, an incredible one-sentence story in which a political candidate who shares Biga’s surname faces re-election and serves charred sausages to indifferent voters.

Highway 13 is more about aftermath than the root causes of evil, in that most of the violence occurs offstage. The murders loom rather than land for the majority of these characters and for a book about such ugly crimes, McFarlane’s stories are remarkably elegant and nuanced.

In many ways the idea of the serial killer is the ultimate fiction, a mythology rather than an actuality for the majority of people; a menace that nonetheless forces them to reappraise their own lives.

Gretchen Shirm’s novel Out of the Woods set at The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia will be published in April 2025.