Any young queer person who has moved to Melbourne has been where Ash is at the beginning of Thomas Vowles’s uneven debut, Our New Gods: wide-eyed and self-conscious on the threshold of a house party somewhere in the inner north. A year has passed since he arrived from Western Australia, and he knows enough about that much-parodied ‘Melbourne-core’ aesthetic (a ‘silver chain’, a semi-floated plan for a tattoo) to worry he’s not performing it well enough. But the stakes feel high. This crowd of ‘angelic figures’ with ‘jagged haircuts’ and hand-rolled ciggies have something he thinks he wants.
Our New Gods is pitched as a ‘literary psychological thriller […] with the suspense of The Talented Mr. Ripley’. Trading in the Amalfi coast for the arguably more insular subcultures north of the Yarra, it pairs every crime-fiction trope with a rite of passage for gay men new to the city. When a body is discovered at a bush doof, Ash launches a private investigation: he steals a bag from a bathhouse, breaks into a mouldy share house and searches Grindr for his prime suspect.
Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley—legendary conman and the original demon twink—Ash has an outsider complex that has been amplified by a twenty-something’s lack of experience and a social milieu (in this case, of mostly wealthy gay men) that makes him self-conscious of his class. But Ash is not much of a sociopath. He’s also less capable than Ripley, though Vowles’s graphic sex scenes ensure Ash is at least less sexually repressed. He’s a romantic, pulled into an obsession with James, a blond-haired manipulator and another cliché of the inner north: a trust fund baby. James is rich because his dad made money ‘from oil or something’, lives in a ‘nice apartment’ in an unspecified ‘trendy suburb’ and is in a relationship with Raf, a Brazilian expat who looks like ‘Jesus in an old oil painting’. As the novel becomes preoccupied with James and Ash’s budding—and co-dependent—romance, it’s more interested in the experience of first love than in cashing in on its thriller potential.
Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley—legendary conman and the original demon twink—Ash has an outsider complex.
Having lived in the inner north for five years, I did scoff at scenes that overstated the significance of Fitzroy Swimming Pool (a place the narrator says has an ‘overwhelming tone [of] the spectacular joy of being young and in love—with everyone and everything, with yourself’) or made a spectacle of an unnamed bathhouse (obviously Collingwood’s Wet on Wellington) as if its horniness—and occasionally evil vibe—was anything but unextraordinary. References to incest (a Grindr profile reads ‘daddy 4 son’ at one point), piss kinks and BDSM summon a Bret Easton Ellis-style edginess that doesn’t sit easily within the novel’s earnest prose. But my main issue is not with the novel’s content—which, for its horny and accurate depictions of bottoming, I applaud—but its style.
Despite the name-dropping, the story could be set anywhere. Though there are references to various Melbourne hot spots, we are never told what suburb Ash lives in or what ‘small country town’ he is from. After a while, this inconsistent play between specificity and generality shrouds everything in a frustrating placelessness. Its near commitment to being nondescript makes the novel’s settings, characters or any potential broader societal commentary feel underrealised. The logic behind which details the novel chooses to name explicitly and those it doesn’t is hard to follow.
When describing Ash’s feelings the novel also too often sacrifices precision for vague or clichéd sentiment. Sitting with James in Carlton Gardens, ‘everyone and everything [is] gleaming with the miracle of existence’. At first, the overwritten prose offers the perfect rendering of the self-important musings of any twenty-one-year-old anxious romantic. Ash’s navel-gazing represents its most astute Melbourne stereotype: someone who hides their main-character complex behind naiveté. When Raf queries his unquestioning belief in the police, for instance, suddenly Ash’s child-like purview is reframed as dangerous ignorance. But the superlative-heavy voice undermines moments of self-awareness. Ash expresses his feelings like he’s taken acid for the first time: peddling heartfelt hyperboles and pseudo-philosophies (‘all I wanted was something to believe in’; ‘everything then on would be pure for me’). In turn, the novel is at its best when he is high or dreaming, as sentences overladen with ambiguous symbols make more sense in a surreal body horror dream sequence or a nightmarish flashback. But these are outliers, effective because they focus Vowles’ tendency to generalise. There’s no restraint when the story returns, inevitably, to love. ‘Everything is an idea of something,’ Ash declares. ‘Every part [of James is] the same mystery that was in the world.’
