Image: Canva.
Down the Rabbit Hole is a novel of diversions. A simple enough premise—a young woman in her early twenties returns to her hometown after years away—takes the reader down a maze of looping, unpredictable paths, many of which reach dead ends. When an answer is near, something else entirely comes in to snatch it away or pivot the reader in another direction.
Debut author Shaeden Berry, whose story ‘Lake Monsters’ was a standout of New Australian Fiction 2023, does this kind of tale well: digging deep into a community to see what secrets are buried. Monsters are omnipresent in Berry’s stories, from the threats of physical violence that hang above women and girls like a funereal shroud to the nagging ugly wounds that lacerate a person’s memory and conscience.
When the novel opens, Hannah Shean is packing her life into a suitcase, preparing to return to Perth to help her ailing mother after half a decade in Melbourne. The reason she left was because her best friend, Alice Montgomery, mysteriously disappeared. Hannah is more or less estranged from her life in Perth, having moved across the country as soon as she became a legal adult to begin a bohemian new existence away from the ghosts of her past.
Berry paints an immediate picture, tossing the first clue out: ‘Hannah is an excellent liar. She is adept at telling people what they need to hear and creating images of herself that suit whatever purpose necessary.’ Hannah is an unreliable narrator from the beginning, but the depths of that slipperiness, and the reasons for her avoidance, become clear as the novel unfurls.
Upon her arrival home, Hannah discovers that Alice’s mother, Marnie, is dying of cancer. She sees this as her opportunity to seek answers about her friend’s disappearance. Prickly and aloof, Hannah keeps everyone at a distance—her mother, neighbour Ginger and her former schoolmate-turned-love-interest Cassie, who also unwittingly becomes her detective sidekick.
When an answer is near, something else entirely comes in to snatch it away.
Marnie is the first person they interrogate, learning her complicated and traumatic history. She leads them to others, each with an intriguing story to tell that circles the stark truth. The novel has hallmarks of a suspense thriller, with its trail of clues, as well as domestic fiction with the intimate interiority of its personal revelations.
I was reminded of Emily Maguire’s excellent 2016 novel An Isolated Incident, which similarly centres a ghostly woman, but turns out to be much more about community attitudes towards misogyny, gendered violence and social mores. The spectre of missing women hangs above both these stories, acting as a kind of moral arbiter—a reminder of loved ones lost, and what one wrong move could cost you. Yet both authors also ensure that despite their physical absence, these women are given rich interior lives and backstories, rather than playing into the trope of a missing woman as a poor, precious thing who is only as important as her relationships to others.
Threaded throughout Down the Rabbit Hole are allusions to Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, from the obvious in the title of the book and name of the missing girl to episodic quotes breaking up the text. The epigraph is especially revealing:
‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’
Alice is the character who is physically missing, but Berry’s great trick is that Hannah is missing too—just emotionally. The character’s splitting—an invented past she can bear, and the truth, which she cannot—is unsustainable. The pretence cannot last.
Berry’s slow uncovering of Hannah’s character, her deep anxieties and avoidances, emphasises the importance of self-awareness and healing. The character’s palpable pain speaks to the realisations many people have in their later years about events that transpired long ago, as they grapple with how their own behaviour could have contributed to cataclysmic interpersonal events.
Such complexity makes for a novel that is equally fast-paced and introspective: Berry’s sharp characterisation, keen observational eye and emotional clarity drive the narrative forward with both intrigue and tenderness. She suggests that closure is a myth: sometimes terrible things happen, and despite the questions, the searching, the yearning, there is no answer—not really. And so, for all the twists and turns of fate, there’s nothing left to do but keep going, to hope for something better, to be better. To step, slowly but surely, into the light. To forgive yourself. To begin again.
Down the Rabbit Hole is our Debut Spotlight book for November.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
