Kirstyn McDermott

I don't read a lot of Fantasy - Dark or not, but luckily I've been steered in the right direction when I have picked up one of these books - and MADIGAN MINE is no exception. What was even more startling is that this is a first book, yet it's very assured, cleverly paced and quite engaging.

This book is the story of Alex Bishop who meets up with his childhood friend Madigan Sargood after many years apart. A very intense love affair follows, with tensions over friendships, time spent together show more and time spent apart. Their affair eventually ends, but the attraction continues. Forever.

There's something very believable about the attraction that Alex has for Madigan. Despite the warnings of friends, despite the way that she takes over his life, but seems oddly to hold back a little from him, Alex cannot and does not want to let go. He is bewitched, besotted and utterly in love. On the one hand Madigan, in some ways as committed to their relationship, is also somewhat absent, often more interested in her increasing band of odd friends and her desire for control of everything and everybody.

All of the characters in this book are extremely engaging. Alex is definitely a victim, but he's not pathetic, or a figure of contempt. His love and support of Madigan is beautifully written. Madigan quickly reveals some complicated sides to her own personality - a victim in her own right, a catalyst, a threat, a lover and an object of worship, a controller who is controlled by events in her own life. It's actually quite a juxtaposition of typical gender expectations that works really well. And there's a good supporting cast from the discomforted flatmate to the acolytes that surround Madison, all of whom lead or spotlight the main characters and their actions.

I came away from MADIGAN MINE really pleased I'd taken the time to pick it up. Whilst Dark Fantasy at it's core, there is enough in this book to engage fans of thrillers as well. Whilst the action and outcomes rely heavily on paranormal aspects - there is also a wonderful sense of foreboding and threat, combined with excellent pace and an overall thriller styling that really really works well. Combine all of those elements with a rather touching, and somewhat sinister love story, and this was definitely a one-sitting book. show less

Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott is the author's first novel but I have previously reviewed her second (unrelated) novel, Perfections. I think the blurb (on the actual cover, rather than what Goodreads thinks the blurb is) of this one sums it up quite nicely:

When Alex Bishop meets Madigan Sargood again after twelve years apart, everything changes. His childhood sweetheart is beautiful and impulsive, but there is something wrong with her. Something dangerous. Then she commits suicide.

Now show more Alex can't get Madigan out if his head. Is it all in his mind, or is she communicating with him?

To save himself and those he loves, Alex must uncover the sinister reason why Madigan took her own life — and why she won't lie still in her grave.

The cover reads, "Obsession never dies..." and the story of Madigan Mine is definitely about obsession. Before I started reading I thought it would be Alex's obsession at the forefront of the novel. There is some of that, but the novel is really about Madigan. Although she is dead at the start — the story opens with her funeral — we get to know her almost as well as Alex, through flashbacks and through Alex's descriptions. Alex quickly falls into a relationship with her after she waltzes back into his life. At first he's happy to be reunited with her after she moved away while they were at school. Their relationship progresses quickly, building on their shared history in a way that makes perfect sense.

Inevitably, things change. Alex finds himself drifting away from Madigan as she surrounds herself with models and hangers-on, gets lost in her art and Alex starts to wonder how well he really knows her. But that's all back story. In the present, Alex is dealing with Madigan's suicide and events surrounding it. And, despite not having seen or spoken with her for weeks before her death, he suddenly finds he can't get her out of his mind. The mental interjections in Madigan's voice are written in grey, which is the first time I remember seeing that in a book, and was a particularly clever way of handing it. There is more symbolism in the slightly washed-out words than there would have been in italics.

The first half or so of the book is fairly contemporary — as in, not speculative fiction — although some horror elements do come into play. (There was one scene in particular that had a fairly high ick factor for me and quite definitively sealed Madigan Mine as horror, in my mind.) In the second half, however, more speculative elements come prpominently to the forefront. Although it starts off like a contemporary novel, I don't expect people who don't like speculative fiction to enjoy it.

Madigan Mine is eerie, haunting (and haunted) and intense. Alex's journey is not an easy one for him nor for the people around him. Right up until the end I wasn't sure if he was going to survive the book. McDermott's début is an excellent start to what I hope will be a long career. I enjoyed Madigan Mine a lot (even the cringe-worthy bits) and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next (probably starting with her Twelve Planet collection, Contains Small Parts, as soon as the ebook is available). I highly recommend Madigan Mine to fans of horror and to fantasy fans who don't mind dark themes — aside from that one scene I mentioned, I didn't feel it rated all that highly on the nightmare-o-meter.

4.5 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. show less

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott is the most recent (just, the next is due to come out soon) addition to the Twelve Planets collections being put out by Twelfth Planet Press. So far, this collection has been shortlisted for the Norma K Hemming Award, made the Ditmar ballot — both as a collection and the first and last stories individually — and was shortlisted for Aurealis Awards as a collection and for Best Horror Short Story for, again, the last story. As far as show more Ditmar voting goes, I'm going to have difficulty deciding how to rank the two stories — "What Amanda Wants" and "The Home for Broken Dolls" — against each other, let alone against the other stories (which I intend to read soon).

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts contains three shorter (but not short!) stories and a novella. Aside from all dealing with the darker sides of human nature, there's not a huge amount of similarity between them. They fit together well in the collection, but beyond that, they're probably best treated individually. I'm not even sure which one I like best and I don't have a least favourite one. Looking below, it's clear I had the most to say about "Horn" but it wasn't the one I enjoyed reading the most. The only sensible conclusion is that CAUTION: Contains Small Parts is a very strong collection, which it is.

I highly recommend CAUTION: Contains Small Parts to fans of horror and contemporary fiction. For those scared of genre fiction, the stories could all be taken as magical realism, if that's what you prefer to think you read. All the stories, as I said, deal with the darker side of humanity and none of them are excessively gory (unless you count damaged and dismembered sex dolls as gory; it's kind of a grey area), though some parts might make you cringe. This is an excellent collection and one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to most people.

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What Amanda Wants — a counsellor with the power to lessen her patients’ trauma. That is, until she meets Amanda, a girl whose problems she can’t figure out. A dark tale, but a satisfying one. Some of the stories within the story aren’t for the faint of heart but then the faint of heart probably shouldn’t’ve picked up this collection to begin with.

Horn — This story is a bit less straightforward. On the surface, it’s a story about a male fantasy writer whose success is overshadowed by personal loss (which he blames on himself and his writing). But when you look at the details, there's a lot more subtext there. For a start, the writer is named Dermott Mack, although, I'm not really sure what Kirstyn McDermott was saying with that detail (perhaps indicating the gender-flip in the story? There are several possible interpretations). The most interesting parts, to me, were the discussion of Dermott Mack masculinising the fantasy genre with his best selling series about violent unicorns. To me this is either a reference to Australia's "female-dominated" fantasy scene (y'know, for a given value of "dominated"), or to the sort of reception female fantasy writers are likely to receive on a more global (well, UK/US) level. And yet, even as we are treated to a scholarly analysis of Mack's masculine work in a feminine world —

“In his efforts to redress a very real gender imbalance, Mack imbues the genre with a fresh, masculine vitality that has been sorely missing from the output of mainstream publishing mills.”

— we're presented with a fan letter that makes mention of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, hardly overly feminine works. Is this addressing the ongoing "discussion" of the masculine and violent nature of grimdark fantasy and whether women can write it (they can)? Or is it a grim gender-flipped parody of the kind of comments female fantasy authors can expect to have thrown their way? I also couldn't help but notice some ironic parallels between this story and another novella by the same name written by Peter M Ball and published by the same publishing house. "Horn" gives this reader much to ponder.

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts — a creepy story and a sad one. The protagonist is sent a toy dog-on-wheels one day for no apparent reason. As he soon learns, it’s not an ordinary toy dog and what he experiences is not a random haunting. It turned out to be less horrifying in the end than I expected to be.

The Home for Broken Dolls — This is probably the most talked-about story (well, novella) in the collection, or at least the one I'd heard most about before reading. At the book's launch — back in June 2013 at Continuum 9 — McDermott read an excerpt which was definitely creepy and horrifying. But it was an excerpt that squicked me out a lot more back then than it did yesterday when I read it in context. I think probably because I was prepared — and it only got a little bit worse than that — and because my mental voice doesn't have the same creepy tone as Kirstyn's did at the launch. Anyway, the story is about a woman who fell into collecting and repairing sex dolls. The kind of dolls that resemble real women (or at least pornstar women) and are as anatomically correct as silicone can be. The passage I mentioned above, describes in loving detail the severe damage a particular doll had suffered when Jane, the main character, first encounters her. There are two main stories here. There's Jane's, who is a “Girl to Whom a Very Bad Thing Happened Once”, and there's the dolls who turn out to have lives of their own (minor spoiler). It's all very sordid, especially the parts about what's been done to the dolls — and the implicit questions of why and what kind of people might do such things — but the main thing that squicked me out upon reading was part of an interaction Jane had with another person, rather than with a doll (details are spoilery, I think). This isn't the kind of horror to make you sleep with the light on or check under the table for errant toys. More the kind that reminds you how unsavoury some people can be.

4.5 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. show less

Nicely done!

This is a sequel to Snow White, which, being a 21stC retelling that appeared on tor.com, had to be darker and turn things on their head, preferably with character drama. But McDermott gives this tale a bite I wasn't expecting, took it places I hadn't thought of. I now want to read more by her.