AustLit

'Chris Womersley’s Ordinary Gods and Monsters is a hybrid novel made with familiar parts. It’s a new iteration of Womersley’s suburban Aussie nostalgia found in his earlier novels, The Diplomat (2019) and Cario (2013), and interspersed through his collected short fiction, but this time the stage is an unnamed Australian town with a tight-knit and thinly veiled criminal underworld. The novel operates comfortably within conventions, deploying several familiar narrative elements (an abusive alcoholic father, a drug-dealing underbelly, self-absorbed and wayward teen narrator, a mysterious death) to create a coming-of-age story with shades of crime fiction.' (Introduction)

'Remember the Shakespeare you had to read in high school? Did you love it or hate it, or sit somewhere in between? Personally speaking, I’m Macbeth and a heart emoji. I suspect when the teenage Chris Womersley read Romeo and Juliet, he underscored Mercutio’s exasperated cry, “A plague o’ both your houses!”' (Introduction)   

'In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.' (Introduction)