Jack Heath's Blog

Hangman

1: Footsteps
2: Silence
3: Your name
4: Your shadow
5: A piano
6: Air
7: A river
8: When it’s ajar
9: A thimble
10: Meat
11: A penny
12: Wood, fire and smoke
13: The third one (the lions are dead)
14: Afraid of frostbite
15: A secret
16: A die
17: Breath
18: The doctor is the mother of the boy
19: A coffin
20: A candle
21: They are hurricanes
22: You don’t need to keep looking once you’ve found me
23: A stopped clock is right twice per da
24: Suicide
25: A choker
26: Tomorrow

Hunter / Just One Bite

1: Bottle
2: Cloud
3: Pulse
4: House at the north pole
5: Staircase
6: Window
7: One is bald
8: Tom is a cat, Cleo is a fish
9: Human, across lifespan
10: J for June
11: Court
12: Seven
13: Heart
14: Flowers
15: Day and night
16: Saw
17: Drop it from seven feet
18: Brain
19: Corn
20: Frozen
21: Towel
22: “If I were to ask the other guard which way was safe…”
23: Lunch and dinner
24: Blood
25: Five minutes
26: JFK
27: Ton
28: He’s dead already
29: Convertible
30: Key
31: Lightning and thunder
32: Triplets
33: See saw
34: Fire
35: Insurance
36: Noon
37: They didn’t tell him where the scene was
38: One is the mother
39: Bacon
40: A promise
41: The survivors don’t get buried
42: Hourglass
43: Phone
44: Alphabet
45: Onion
46: A hole
47: Umbrellas
48: A memory

Hideout

1: Hideout
2: Nose
3: Die
4: Queen
5: Glove
6: France
7: Poacher
8: Swallow
9: Shark
10: Gorge
11: Hedgehog
12: Peephole
13: Watchdog
14: Fingerprint
15: Cleaner
16: They gave him the cold shoulder
17: Mask
18: Ditto
19: Toast
20: Snake
21: Funeral
22: Covered
23: Thinking
24: Fire
25: Fetus
26: Water
27: Labyrinth
28: Sugar
29: Dogwood
30: Housemates
31: Driving
32: Penny
33: Tree
34: Organ
35: Postage
36: Illegal
37: Polish
38: Pipes
39: Chili
40: Heart attack
41: Tank top
42: Sunrise
43: Battering ram
44: Goodbye
45: Cliffhanger

Headcase

1: Shrink
2: Astro-naught
3: In or-bit
4: A hold-up
5: Re-cycling
6: An eardrum
7: A debriefing
8: A mess-age
9: A sneeze guard
10: Cough-ee
11: Razor wire
12: Serene
13: Punch
14: On a steak out
15: A patient
16: A hook
17: Leaning
18: A dictator
19: Air-con
20: Voila
21: A fair
22: Wednesday
23: A vision / double vision
24: A crow bar
25: GA-rage
26: A flashbang
27: A mind’s eye
28: A hand-shake
29: Sun glasses
30: A lap top
31: Hang (hang out, hang up)
32: Cups
33: Snot (tons)
34: I mist
35: Buttons
36: Newspapers
37: A remote
38: Airborne
39: A circle
40: Bowling
41: A cereal killer
42: Keys
43: A head-case

...where Indi (Harrison Ford) and his father (Sean Connery) are tied to chairs, having been captured by Nazis after Indi's girlfriend betrayed them.

Indi quietly asks his father, "How did you know she was a Nazi?"

His father replies, "She talks in her sleep."

Indi does a double-take.

When I first saw that movie I was about 8, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my parents' house, way too close to their CRT television. I thought, "Nazis talk in their sleep? What an interesting piece of trivia."

I watched that movie a lot of times over the next few years. When I was about 12, and old enough to realise the idea that Nazis talk in their sleep was absurd, I interpreted the double-take differently. I thought, "Ohhh. Indi has suddenly realised his father has lost his marbles."

It's been more than 20 years since I've seen that movie, but having watched it over and over back when my brain was still spongy and malleable, I don't need to see it again. I can watch a highlight reel in my head whenever I feel like it (although while fact-checking this piece I noticed that Ford and Connery weren't tied to chairs, as I remembered). This scene popped into my head recently, and I finally, finally, understood why Indi was so startled.

It made me laugh.

I'm sharing this story because I've been thinking about how many metrics are involved in the consumption of art these days. When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out, there weren't many ways of measuring its success - just the number of dollars it earned at the box office, the quality of the reviews in the newspapers, and the number of Oscars it was eventually nominated for (3, winning 1). If it were made now, the distributor could track not only how many people watched it, but at exactly what point viewers were most likely to stop watching, which scenes got paused and replayed, and how likely viewers were to tell their friends about it on social media. All this extra data seems like it should help filmmakers tell better stories.

But how do you track which jokes will make people laugh, when they're thinking about it 20 years later?

You don't, I guess. Algorithms can track your behaviour, but they can't actually spy on your thoughts (yet). So, creators optimise for the data they do have. This creates an incentive to tell stories which keep people watching, listening and sharing, but which are quickly forgotten. Engaging, but evaporative. I'm sure there are many reasons for the effervescence of contemporary film and television (the sheer amount of content, pressure to compete with social media, the fact that 45% of us are watching our phones and our TVs at the same time) but this is definitely one piece of the puzzle.

I don't have Spielberg's genius, but I am lucky enough to be working in a medium that isn't quite so quantifiable (although that is changing). This means I'm free to tell the stories I think readers will remember for years to come, even if I have no way of telling whether my instincts are right.

I had a terrific time meeting readers, writers, librarians, volunteers and other awesome people.

At one point, while I was trying to find the green room, I bumped into Clive Hamilton.

"Clive!" I said. "You probably don't remember me--Tom Griffiths introduced us back in 2017. Jack Heath."

"Oh, right," he said. "How have you been?"

We chatted for a while about the haunted building at the Lyneham shops and the way households are a bit like very, very small towns, and then we parted ways.

Yesterday, while cooking some nachos, I realised with a start that the person Tom Griffiths actually introduced me to was Tim Flannery, and that I'd never met Clive Hamilton before. But I'd said I knew him with so much confidence that he actually believed me.

If you're reading this, sorry Clive. (And Tim.) But this experience helped me realise that my talents are wasted on literature, and I'm clearly cut out for the world of espionage. If you're a recruitment officer for one of the big five spy agencies, call me! I assume you have my number.

Wanna add it to your TBR?

The Peak (Spy Academy #1)

After five years of work, Kill Your Brother came out last night! It's my fourth adult crime novel, and my first set in Australia. It's narrated by Hannah Monson (Sorrow & Bliss) who brings a terrific depth—and rage—to the characters. There are no cannibals in it, but it still has all the dark twists you've come to expect from a Jack Heath thriller. (Bestselling crime author Paul Cleave says it's one of the best books he's ever read.) I'm really excited to hear what you think.

The book is about Elise Glyk, a disgraced athlete who is abducted and held prisoner in a septic tank behind a farmhouse in rural NSW. She's told she will be released if she murders the other captive, who happens to be her brother. Will she do it? Would you?

The book is free for Audible members in Australia and for Audible Plus members in the US and UK. (If you're in New Zealand, Canada or elsewhere, bear with me—I'm still investigating.) If you're not an Audible member, you can still buy the book. But can I quickly say that if you like audiobooks, an Audible subscription is well worthwhile. I use mine constantly.

I've been locked out of Facebook, which is great for my mental health, but leaves me unable to promote Kill Your Brother to my thousands of followers. So I need your help! If you enjoy Kill Your Brother, leave a review. Tell your friends. And if you post anything about it on social media, let me know so I can share!

For more about the book, check out the Q&A at jackheathwriter.com/kill-your-brother.

The first book is about a mysterious group who mastermind a mass-breakout from Pronghorn Correctional Facility in the middle of the Nevada desert. As 600 violent criminals stream towards Las Vegas, US Marshal Trinity Parker is summoned to kick some ass and take some names—and to make sure she gets all the credit.

The second book is about John Kradle—an inmate from Pronghorn's death row—who decides that this is his chance to prove his innocence. But a determined prison guard, Celine Osbourne, is hellbent on putting him back in his box.

The third book (my personal favourite) is a collection of short stories. A woman vanishes on the day of her son's birth, and reappears 14 fears later. A blackjack dealer, recovering from trauma, is confronted at work by her escaped convict ex-husband. A sleazy Elvis impersonator who does weddings comes face-to-face with an unsatisfied customer—also an escaped prisoner. And an old man roams the unfamiliar landscape, not trying especially hard to avoid capture, but nevertheless having an extraordinary run of good luck. (In contrast to the bloody violence that fills the rest of the book, the old man's crimes are all happen off-camera. I know from experience that some readers hate inferring things* but I thought this part was ingenious.)

There's a huge cast of characters, but author Candice Fox makes them all instantly memorable. (We first meet John Kradle using a toaster as a soldering iron in his cell, making a wooden sign that says "Please wipe your feet.") They range from reluctantly good to terrifyingly evil, and every part of the spectrum in between is well-represented. With a plot as outrageous as this one, it's important that the people trapped in it feel utterly real. While Kradle's mission couldn't be more clichéd ("I want to take revenge on the man who killed my family!") he brings such raw pathos to his role that it's impossible not to feel for the guy, and to admire his cunning as he outwits the US Marshals.

The strange, sad, harsh world of Vegas is captured with humour and style, with plenty of fun details to keep the reader from skimming. (At one point, in the background, a group of people carry their huge new TV out of a Walmart and push it across a four-lane highway in a shopping cart—at midnight.) There's also an admirable lack of self-consciousness in the way the book addresses race, gender and other thorny topics. In some novels, you can feel the author tiptoeing around the landmines. Fox strides confidently between them.

If there's a disadvantage to writing a book that begins with 600 people escaping from prison, it's that the action can't really build from there. Not that The Chase doesn't try—there's a plane heist, several shoot outs and other action scenes to come. But towards the end it clamps a lid on the pyrotechnics and becomes more character-driven. That's probably a sensible move, and it makes for an emotionally satisfying conclusion, with one minor drawback. A plot-driven ending might have included an epic clash between Parker, Kradle, Osbourne, the terrorist, the old man, the person who killed Kradle's family, and the various other drivers of the action. The three books could have merged into one. The more character-based ending, while more realistic, doesn't have much connective tissue. The stories remain largely separate.

I should acknowledge the two narrators of the audiobook, Lisa Negrón and David de Vries, who each do a variety of entertaining voices. Kradle and Osbourne in particular are a lot of fun to listen to, though for the scenes with not much dialogue, I preferred reading the print version. Fox's descriptions are expressive enough on their own.

In conclusion, if you loved the first season of Prison Break, but thought the second series was kind of a let-down (OK, so they're out—now what?) then The Chase is absolutely the book for you.

If you either didn't see or didn't care for Prison Break, then you're still in for a hell of a ride.

*Yes, reviewer who complained that Blake "doesn't eat anybody" in Hideout, this is directed at you.

~

Jack Heath is the author of Kill Your Brother.

And that movie was actually written in the seventies, as a role for Steve McQueen. This basic story structure - bodyguard initially dislikes principal, reluctantly falls for her, and also kills a bunch of bad guys - can probably be found on cave paintings. But I doubt it's ever been executed as well as it is in The Devils You Know.

Vincent is a former Navy Seal who served in Iraq - now he's in California, a flip-flop wearing bodyguard for a supermarket tycoon, with no interest in ever touching a gun again. He expects to spend most of his time surfing, and the rest of it writing a screenplay. (When in LA, right?) But the tycoon's daughter, Erin, is a headline-grabbing conservative pundit, and soon she needs protecting from a hit squad. Vincent finds himself needing his old skills, breaking his new codes, and reluctantly becoming the man he used to be.

The story is ultra-modern on a superficial level. The characters use smartphones, and chat about 9/11, Antifa and "the intellectual dark web". But under the hood, a vintage motor is roaring. An ex-military tough guy who just wants the quiet life, a classy dame who needs protecting, a hitman who likes to muse about the human condition before he pulls the trigger, the smell of cordite after every gunfight - this book wouldn't be out of place on bestseller lists any time in the last eight decades. But that's not to say that the plot doesn't throw some terrific curveballs.

The Devils You Know is written with the flair of James Elroy or Elmore Leonard - or perhaps Quentin Tarantino. Every sentence is scrubbed to a mirror sheen. (I just opened to a random page: "All day, she'd managed to keep it to one side—emotional periphery—but now it was right here, and she felt this strange temptation just to give up, sink into the feeling that everything was terrible, irreparable. And in her head the undamaged world—a counter-world—was playing out, and they had gone to dinner like she'd said in her note to him, and the real world seemed built on such surreal and morbid chance it was absurd she was even here.")

It would be unfair to describe The Devils You Know as "style over substance." The style IS the substance. Sanders knows the perfect word for everything, which makes even the non-fight scenes a joy to read. Those non-fight scenes are rare, though. From the bone-crunching punch-up on page 14 to the bloody shootout in the remote house, action fans will have a blast. Just to give some idea of how this book rolls, almost everyone introduced in chapter 1 is dead by the end of chapter 11.

The linguistic flair helps the reader overlook the parts that don't withstand much scrutiny. Vincent, for example, ultimately seduces Erin by heckling her from the crowd during a TV appearance. That doesn't make sense on either a plot or character level, but it's very cool, and cool is Sanders' main concern. (Which isn't to say there aren't hidden depths here. Vincent's political disagreements with Erin are unexpectedly nuanced, though they may start to feel repetitive for some readers.) The narrator of the audiobook, Chris Coucouvinas, also deserves a shout-out. He makes the most of the already gleaming dialogue, with a mixture of laid-back, macho and vulnerable voices that the reader can't help but lean into.

If you like the hard-boiled genre, Sanders might be the best living writer of it - you'll love The Devils You Know. As with The Stakes and American Blood before it, I couldn't put it down, and didn't want it to end.

Jack Heath is the author of Hideout.

I can see why so many people have encouraged me to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Vernon loves his wife, Petunia, their infant son, Dudley, and his work in manufacturing. But when Vernon is forced to adopt his wife's young nephew, Harry, his life starts to fray at the edges. Dudley has behavioral problems that Petunia is struggling to address and Vernon is reluctant to acknowledge, and when Harry is introduced to the mix, both are concerned that Dudley will miss out on the care he needs. They feed, clothe and shelter their nephew for a decade, but otherwise try to change their domestic routines as little as possible for fear of disturbing Dudley, even going so far as to put Harry in a windowless bedroom under the stairs rather than give up Dudley's toy storage room. The older Harry gets, though, the more obvious it becomes that he's everything Dudley isn't: quick-witted, funny and - especially - imaginative, though there are hints that his imagination may have a darker side. Vernon and Petunia can only afford to send one of the boys to a public school - what if Harry's needs are greater than Dudley's?

Embittered by the full realisation of their biological son's shortcomings, Vernon and Petunia find themselves directing their anger at Harry, who, in return, finds it impossible to bond with them, showing no gratitude for having been taken in. In his room under the stairs, Harry creates an elaborate fantasy life, in which he's rich, famous, important and has magical powers - and is miles away from the Dursleys. As Harry's fantasies slowly become delusions, Vernon tries his best to help, but to no avail. When Harry becomes fixated on the daily arrival of the post, Vernon at first hides all the correspondance the family receives, then nails the mail slot shut, then takes the family on a wild drive across the countryside. But he's clueless about mental illness, being a middle class factory manager in 1980s Britain. (No precise year is given, but the language, social mores and levels of technology make the setting clear.) Vernon only makes things worse. At first, Harry is aware of the line between imagination and reality. The novel begins with a dream sequence involving a flying motorbike. Harry knows it's a dream, but he mentions it to Vernon. Panicked by his adopted son's apparently deteriorating mental state, Vernon bellows, "Motorbikes can't fly!" Soon, Harry's certainty that it was a dream has evaporated.

The era is well sketched, but author JK Rowling makes the surprising and frankly bizarre choice to spend almost two thirds of the book in Harry's imagined world, which is largely lifted from popular novels of the thirties, forties and fifties (and some older myths). He sees himself travelling to a boarding school filled with other supernatural beings, most of whom love him unconditionally before even meeting him - and even the cartoonish few who hate him are obsessed with him. Here he doesn't have to compete with Dudley for attention. This is humourous, but has the effect of distancing the reader. It's unclear where Harry really is - a hospital? Stonewall High School? Still under the stairs?

There are clues that Harry cares for his adopted family, at least subconsciously. The name of his imaginary best friend, Ron Weasley, sounds a lot like Vern Dursley. The colours of his school house, Gryffindor, are red and gold, just like the petals on a Queen of Hearts Petunia, and like the red faces and blonde hair of his uncle and cousin. But Harry is blind, perhaps wilfully, to the emotional and financial toll that child-rearing has taken on them. (In one heartbreaking scene, they mail him a fifty pence piece as a Christmas gift, to which Harry gives no thought at all.)

Ultimately, the book leaves a lot not only unresolved, but unclear. It's not spoiling too much to say that Harry returns to the real world, but some delusions cling to him. Vernon, Petunia and Dudley seem anxious, all committed to being nice to Harry, but all aware that he could be dangerous. It's an ominous and somewhat off-putting conclusion, and an audience used to happy endings may balk. But I, for one, am looking forward to seeing where Rowling takes the series. Perhaps Harry will have children of his own, and finally understand what Vernon went through? Then all would be well.

Jack Heath is the author of Hideout.

Should it be the kind where a ute-driving sheila says "strewth" while chowing down on a kangaroo burger? Or the kind set in a fictitious town in an unnamed country, which avoids all slang and never mentions the date, for fear of revealing that the book is set in the southern hemisphere? Either way, you're likely to alienate readers both foreign and domestic, so it's easiest to just set your book in Texas (for example). But author Sarah Thornton apparently likes a challenge, and dances across the antipodean tightrope with ease.

Lawyer Clementine Jones moves to a small coastal town in Queensland, a nice long way away from her bad reputation. She's after the quiet life, and she gets it, for about a page and a half. Then a friend of hers is found impaled on a tree, having fallen off a cliff. The cops think the friend jumped, Clem reckons she was pushed. She takes it upon herself to find the truth, but her investigation is hampered by the arrival of an ex-con football player, who wants Clem to come home and coach his team. (Those who haven't read the previous book in the series, Lapse , may do a double-take at this point. Having scored a freebie of White Throat, I haven't read Lapse, but I'm now very tempted.)

When we categorise books into a genre, we often do them a disservice. The best novels are made from a blend of contrasting ingredients. In White Throat, Clem's sadness and anger at her friend's death is explored, but not wallowed in. It's balanced by moments of sharp humour, erotic romance and even horror. One moment I was feeling deeply sorry for Clem, the next I was admiring her cunning. The story has plenty of plot twists, but it was these emotional pivots that I enjoyed most.

Like many contemporary Australian thrillers, the story does squeeze in perhaps one too many reveals. Towards the end, Clem zip-zap-zooms from theory to theory and suspect to suspect, rather than moving steadily towards the truth. The point is to drop her into some dangerous situations, and fortunately, they don't disappoint. The action scenes, particularly those on water, are intense and real.

When the second word of the first page of White Throat was "ute," I was very suspicious. By the end, I'd forgotten that the book was Australian, but that was because I was having so much fun, rather than because it was hiding its Bight under a bushel. Highly recommended.

Jack Heath is the author of Hideout.

Cube? Great movie. Sphere? An underrated masterpiece. The Ring? Terrifying. The Blob? Even more so. And the scariest villain in Silent Hill was Pyramid Head.

Enter Uzumaki, a 1998 collection of stories about a town haunted (possessed, perhaps?) by spirals. Not spiral-shaped creatures, mind you - just the shape itself, or the concept of it. The plot revolves around teen Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi, who have the misfortune to live in this doomed town. Shuichi's father is obsessed with spirals - shells, coiled worms, the swirling water in his bathtub. He spends hours staring at his collection of spiral-shaped objects and is angry when his wife cooks non-spiral dumplings. Kirie is drawn into his orbit when he says he'll pay "any amount!" for a spiral bowl from her father, a potter. His obsession eventually inspires him to mutilate his own body.

Shuichi's mother, the second victim, has an equal and opposite descent into madness. Terrified after witnessing what the spirals "did" to her husband, she refuses to be in the same room as one - in hospital, she won't let a nurse with curled hair treat her, and panics when she sees that the tube for her intravenous drip has been left in a coil. When she notices that her fingerprints are basically spirals, she, like her husband, does something that will leave even hardened horror fans wincing, bringing things full circle. After that, things pretty quickly spiral out of control.

Early in my career I angered some of my readers by expressing a dislike for Blade Runner (all fifty versions of it). "Eyes" just didn't seem to me like much of a theme, no matter how many retina close-ups we got, no matter how many people's eyeballs were scanned or gouged out. "Spirals" is an even sillier motif to centre a story around, but it's the strangeness that makes it work. Fleeing from zombies or Godzilla is sensible. Fleeing from spirals is madness, and madness is what writer/artist Junji Ito is most interested in. Reading this book feels like losing your mind. I found I couldn't read it right before bed (that's about the biggest compliment you can give a horror story) because I wouldn't be able to sleep, my thoughts spinning around and around in tighter and tighter circles.

It's amazing just how much juice Ito can squeeze from such a thin premise. Whirlwinds! Corkscrews! Snake-sex! Even time itself! It's all spirals, man, and they're coming to get you.

It's a pity, then, that the characters are so flat. Kirie has little personality beyond "Shuichi's girlfriend", and it's unclear that they're even in a relationship until the final pages. Kirie's concern for her brother leaves the reader thinking, "Wait - she has a brother?" (She also suddenly has a pregnant cousin.) As for Shuichi, his only noticeable trait is that he's kind of a jerk, making Kirie bring lunch to him so he doesn't have to leave the house, and then berating her for being outdoors during a spiral-shaped hurricane.

Some of the stories also move a little too quickly, in a way that makes them simultaneously predictable and bizarre. "Funny how he only shows up at school when it's raining," says Kirie about a painfully slow-moving boy who is obviously going to turn into a snail. "He loved to jump out and surprise people. Everyone called him Jack-in-the-Box," she says about a different boy who is clearly going to end up bursting out of a coffin with a giant spring (spirals, man!) stuck in his backside.

The stories also end abruptly, with little explanation and even less fallout. When dozens of people are murdered (with spiral-shaped hand-drills, naturally) in the town hospital, I don't think anyone even calls the police. And the complete collection ends on a similarly morose note. I thought perhaps Kirie might bring another shape - a tetrahedron, perhaps? - to the very centre of the giant spiral that haunts the town, thus breaking the curse, the way a flaw in the foundations can bring down a building. The tetrahedron could have been on a pendant, given to her by Shuichi, giving the reader a hint that he cared about her, or felt anything at all. Wearing this pendant might even have explained her apparent immunity to the madness in the town.

I won't spoil the ending, but that's not what happens.

The stories may feel rushed because Ito spent most of his time on the art, which is truly extraordinary. The level of detail in each panel surpasses any other manga I've read. And the big reveals - Shuichi's father's twisted corpse, the tangled limbs of the people in the row house - are breathtaking. You might yelp out loud when turning the page, and then keep turning back to it, even after you've finished the book.

Or, you might not. Either way, you'll certainly never look at your zucchini spiraliser the same way again.

Jack Heath is the author of Hideout.