Book Review: Salvage by Jason Nahrung

[klward]

Salvage

by Jason Nahrung. Twelfth Planet Press, 2012

Reviewed by Kyla Ward, 2012

"I mean, for Christ's sake, Mel; you're a grown woman. Why do you read this trash?"

"It's imagination, Richard. It's entertaining. It takes me away."

"Takes you away from what?..."

Everyone has something they need to escape from, even if just for a week or two. What better place than a quiet island off the Queensland coast? Melanie knows in her heart that it's going to take more than this to ease the trauma of a late-term miscarriage and to save a marriage that was already floundering, but you have to start somewhere. Life, after all, goes on.

The horror here is, initially, the sticky, bloody awfulness of normal life, full of accident and the unsaid, and this is why the setting works. Beach-front cabins a few weeks in advance of the holiday season, sun, surf and bushland: Nahrung shows us fear in a handful of sand and incrementally increasing flies. When the attempted reconciliation hits the rocks, another escape presents in Helena, a beautiful Greek woman who suffers from a chronic illness and a husband as overprotective as Mel's is careless. There is more going on here than Mel is at first able to put together and by the time she does, death may be the only escape that is left...

Full review here.