Those lines could serve as something of a modus operandi for Womersley’s decorated career. His work is nominally crime fiction but deeply interested in how crisis reveals character and the dark nights of the soul that follow an upheaval. It is populated by characters on the run from something,their reality often blurred by hallucinogens and fogged by persistent memories.
In Ordinary Gods and Monsters,his teenage narrator,Nick,is aware he’s precariously perched on the precipice of adulthood. He’s about to be given a shove when Mr Perry,the father of Marion,his neighbour and friend,is killed in a hit-and-run incident.
“It could have been any summer’s evening,but of course it wasn’t”,Nick observes as he shares a stolen cigarette with Marion. “It was the end of some things,the beginning of so many others.”
The pair start trying to piece together what happened. Nick’s weed dealer,Becky,does a seance to communicate with the dead man,and her Ouija board produces the name “Morris”. Then,at Marion’s father’s wake,an enigmatic businessman introduces himself to Nick,telling the youngster to give him a call if he wants to do work more rewarding than his part-time gig at McDonald’s. His name? Morris.
Marion’s grief and the pair’s amateur sleuthing complicate their relationship,they’ve grown up together,but Nick wants more. He jealously observes as she tentatively starts to date someone else,returning him to his role as “the pale suitor perched forever beneath her window”.
Nick wants to move out of suburban Melbourne but doesn’t know where he’ll go. He has a shopping list of ambitions:“Arts,literature,travelling the world” but little concept of how to break out of his ennui. His home life is in flux,with his abusive,philandering father only intermittently around and his mother planning to sell the house and start afresh.