Red Spikes

The ten stories in this young adult collection are unsettling, some disturbing, and deliberately so. Lanagan, who won the 2007 Australian Book Council Award with Red Spikes, presents readers with situations in which the familiar takes on a bizarre, even nightmarish patina; echoes of fairytales and traditional stories, horror and fantasy are brought to bear on a variety of situations, some strange in themselves, others not so unusual like the girl who feels she is a stranger in her family in the final story ‘Daughter of the Clay’.

‘Baby Jane’ sees Dylan, a boy whose mother is a hippyish midwife, forced to deliver a baby for a toy-sized queen who assumes human proportions for the occasion, but shrinks back to miniature size after the birth, leaving Dylan holding the baby. The stories, some of which feature non-human characters, are built around familiar themes like birth and love, but looked at from different and destabilizing perspectives.

A useful and interesting list of acknowledgements at the end of the book provides Lanagan’s inspiration and sources for the stories, perhaps enticing readers to some of the stories that provided her ideas.

Red Spikes will appeal to readers who are looking for something different and who like a challenge, and perhaps also those young adults who describe reading as ‘boring’, because boring is one thing that these stories are not!