This week saw the arrival of Red River Road by Anna Downes into book stores around the country. Brace yourself for an intensly scary ride!
Anna Downes established herself in the thriller genre and gained international success with her previous novels: The Safe Place (2020) and The Shadow House (2021). This is her third novel and I was lucky enough to get my hands on it prior to its official release.
Anna Downes definitely left a lasting impression! I anxiously swallowed this book in a few days, going to sleep slightly uneasy after the first day of reading and flat out terrified by the end of it. Red River Road is so hard to put down, Downes successfully keeps you thirsty from cliff hanger to cliff hanger. My opinion is that it is begging for a horror film adaptation. But, I honestly will be too scared to watch it.
Red River Road is told by three narrators: the grief struck Katy who is on a mission to find her sister Phoebe that disappeared on a solo road trip through WA’s Coral Coast; the solo traveller Beth who befriends Katy while escaping an abusive relationship with the road robber Lucas; and Wyatt Cleary, Lucas’s younger brother who lives in the small town Ningaloo with his single dad following their mother’s disappearance.
Katy is determined to find her sister, but Beth, who is highly educated on human psychology, can’t quite read Katy’s personality and is confused by the way her friend is going about solving her mystery. As their friendship deepens and more clues are found, it becomes clear that Phoebe’s disappearance story is not at all what the girls thought. As they arrive in Ningaloo, where coastal charm meets darkness, the shocking answers start to unravel. Both Phoebe’s and Nova Cleary’s fates are revealed once all the characters involved start spilling their secrets.
The psychological thriller is well-paced, with the author continuously dropping clever clues while never giving away enough for you to solve the mystery. Somewhere towards the middle, enough is said for you to start some decent speculation but then the twist leaves you gobsmacked. I had no clue what happened to Phoebe or what is going on with Wyatt and just as I thought I had it figured out, Downes managed to get me by surprise with a completely different narrative.
The content is absolutely brilliant, my only notes are to the editing which could be improved. Some of the editing choices left me confused. Firstly, the use of italics is inconsistent: in the sections narrated by Beth they are used for flashbacks but in Wyatt’s sections they are used for quotes out of the movies that are playing in his background. Wyatt’s flashbacks are not italicised and sometimes italics are used for thoughts or indentations.
To add to the confusion, the age of each character is hard to establish, with the time in Wyatt’s narrative largely inconsistent. Wyatt keeps reminicisng on the time he was 13 and his brother Lucas was 23: that is when Lucas apparently told Wyatt about their mother’s disappearance and later left home. But at one point Wyatt is frustrated that he wasn’t given this information earlier under the excuse he was too young to hear it. He says, “I was thirteen!”. He later says his mother disappeared six years ago but at present time he is still in school (a detail that took me a while to establish as his narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time) meaning his mother definitely disappeared before he turned 13. Lucas is meant to be in his twenties, but Beth later describes her and Lucas as thirty-something year old looking couple.
Being a seasoned reader and writer I could easily pick up on these errors and even though they didn’t take away from the novel’s impact I hope they’ll be resolved in future edits.
The book celebrates strong female characters that can hold their own against all odds. It touches on domestic violence, trauma and the human psyche. It brings the spooky outback to life but doesn’t dwell in the cliche space of a horror story told by the campfire. It is very Australian, very modern, and very relatable.
Red River Road by Anna Downes is seriously the scariest thing that happened to me in a while. If you’re a horror fan, run and get your copy.
FOUR AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Red River Road by Anna Downes is available now from Affirm Press. Grab yourself a copy from Booktopia HERE.
