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)