You won't find Outer Maroo on any map, and the people who live there intend to keep it that way. In Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary new novel Oyster, this bleak, drought-stricken town in the Australian outback is home to a scant handful of religious fundamentalists and rowdy, gun-toting opal miners. United by their dislike for taxmen, the government, and "foreigners," the inhabitants have managed to keep their town's underground riches a secret from the world--until the day when a bloody, raving, but "quite strikingly beautiful" man staggers in from the desert and changes everything: "Then Oyster came, and quite soon after, jeeps began to announce themselves in small red clouds. There were campers and squatters, and they kept arriving as the zeros on the calendar got closer; or at any rate that was the connection that Oyster himself made, and the newcomers shared his belief, and so disposed themselves for a certain kind of future, now upon us." In the weeks to come, the charismatic Oyster draws young drifters to his commune outside town, Oyster's Reef, where they become little more than slave labor in the Reef's opal fields. Seduced by his apocalyptic rhetoric or corrupted by his money, the town enters into a strange complicity with the mysterious guru, and anyone who dares to question the arrangement--including a local schoolteacher--conveniently disappears. Eventually, town and cult alike perish in a bloody firestorm that recalls events in Waco, Texas. Throughout, Turner Hospital expertly evokes the desert's shifting dreamscape, a land of pitiless light and heat where the atmosphere itself conspires to create illusion; narrated by a shifting cast of characters, moving back and forth in time, this eerie, hypnotic book often seems much the same way.


From Publishers Weekly
A rank, festering smell hangs over the desolate Australian Outback town of Outer Maroo, so isolated that it can't be found on any map of Queensland. The smell, which the town's wary inhabitants call Old Fuckatoo, is engendered by the corpses of animals dead in the lingering drought?and something more mysterious and horrible, "the feral stench of hate." Dreadful events, carried out under the mandate of religious fundamentalism, have occurred here , but no one dares to refer to them, or to the charismatic cult leader who called himself Oyster and whose acolytes worked like slaves mining opals and serving Oyster's insatiable sexual appetite. Oyster and his followers disappeared in a wave of violence unleashed by evil Dukke Prophet, a member of the churchgoing community of the Living Will, and ever since, no strangers have been allowed into town to look for their missing loved ones. The Bible-quoting, hypocritically sanctimonious Prophet deposed the Living Will's mild pastor and demanded fire and brimstone in the name of salvation. Prophet, a lecherous rancher named Andrew Godwin and the proprietor of the town's only pub are making millions in illegally traded opals while cowing the town's inhabitants and accumulating massive armaments. Armageddon beckons. Part of the seductive power of Hospital's novels (The Last Magician; Charades) lies in her practice of constructing the plot in a series of interlocking narratives, like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Here, much of the action is filtered through the thoughts of Mercy Givens, the young daughter of the deposed pastor. Mercy's precocious but innocent mind resists the full meaning of the brutal acts that finally engulf the community. She and the others in the beautifully observed cast of characters?a schoolteacher doomed because she tells the truth, the parents of two missing cultists, an Aborigine woman, two of society's outcasts who have tried to forget their pasts?gradually reveal the terror of people held under the iron fist of religious fanaticism. As the chilling truth becomes more clear and as the suspense mounts, Hospital creates her most powerful and dazzling novel to date. In sensuous prose, feverish with the cadences of mystery and doom, sometimes hallucinatory but always meticulously controlled, she spins a story eerie in its timeliness and credibility. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This novel tells a tale fit for the millennium. In a part of the Australian Outback so remote it is literally off the charts, a tiny opal-mining and ranching community faces the end of its world. A place of closed minds and closely held secrets, Outer Maroo has become dangerous since the arrival and departure of the fascinating, sinister spiritual leader calling himself Oyster. Since Oyster's coming, certain areas of conversation are taboo, minds are unhinged, and reality seems hard to define. Outsiders are met with distrust, dislike, and worse, while a seemingly endless drought heightens tension unbearably. When two particularly stubborn strangers demand information about their lost children, disciples of Oyster, they initiate Armageddon for Outer Maroo. Related from multiple perspectives and shifting back and forth in time, the narrative maintains the pace and suspense of a technothriller, yet its principal strengths lie in mood and characters depicted in exquisite prose. Hospital (The Last Magician, LJ 9/15/92) deserves a wide readership for this book.-?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


A New York Times Notable Book of 1998; New York Times Book Review, 6 December 1998
A half-surreal novel set in a dreamscape Australia, populated by frontiersmen and cultists whose consciousness, warped by extreme conditions, ignites a combustive disaster.


The Observer
A tour de force . . . by one of the best female novelists currently writing in English. Janette Turner Hospital's fine new novel concerns a place, called Outer Maroo, which is literally off the map; so far out in the back of the Australian Outback that it has escaped the prying eyes of the Government surveyors . . . a place riddled with secrets, with hidden and nasty history, possessed of nothing remarkable but, as one character says, 'the lure of nowhere.'....[Hospital's] language is fascinating and extraordinarily powerful and her narrative shimmers and shifts like the displaced reality in the heat of Outer Maroo itself.


Washington Post Book World, "Experts Pick Their Favorites of 1998," Carolyn See, 6 December 1998
[A] gory, freaky, Gothic, absolutely beautifully written novel set in the Australian Outback....Janette Turner Hospital makes this vicious world as mysteriously beautiful as the opal mines in which it's set. This is the perfect gift for your friend with a mildly twisted brain and a love of language.


From Booklist
Hospital's demanding, densely layered, symphonic novels have never received the attention they deserve--a bit too ornate to achieve commercial success or win high-profile awards. This latest effort doesn't quite match The Last Magician (1992), Hospital's magnum opus, but it's a triumph all the same, and with a story line that draws on plays to millennial fever, it may reach a larger audience. Outer Maroo is so far into the Australian outback, it doesn't appear on any maps, which is just fine as far as the government-hating opal miners and God-fearing holy rollers who live there are concerned. Then a charlatan called Oyster arrives and establishes a cult on a distant reef, attracting the usual spiritually adrift young people, winning over the holy rollers with talk of apocalypse, and drawing the miners into his fold by offering them what they crave--the fieriest opals this side of Hell. A few holdouts, mavericks who see the evil in Oyster's eyes and aren't hypnotized by the opal's fire, attempt to resist, but most fall into "the seductive drift of helplessness." Matters come to a head when two parents, searching for their disappeared children, make their way to Outer Maroo and unwittingly instigate the final slouch toward Armaggedon. Hospital writes of the lure of cults not with the outraged eyes of a moralist but with an artist's sensitivity to mood and character. We feel Oyster's power in the "bent air" of Outer Maroo, and we smell the "feral stench of hatred" as the conspirators stalk the outsiders. A genuinely hypnotic novel. Bill Ott


From Kirkus Reviews
Echoes of Waco, Heaven's Gate, and Jonestown combine with intimations of apocalypse in a stunningly evocative story of life in a remote Australian hell-hole--a place where evil is as pervasive as the heat, goodness as rare as rain. Australian writer Hospital (The Last Magician, 19??, etc.) sets her morality tale in Outer Maroo, a town in a hot, arid region where droughts are common and a sinister, moistureless fog often covers the land. It's a place so remote that it's not even on the maps, yet its soil is riven with opal seams. These opals, and the isolation, attract folks ``who are always waiting for retribution to catch up with them''--including the charismatic Oyster, who founds a commune (Oyster's Reef) just outside of town. Gradually, he begins to attract idealistic young people; they come as disciples, but soon find themselves digging for opals and catering to Oyster's increasingly bizarre needs. A chorus of voices recalls his lethal effect on Outer Maroo--how he corrupted many of the locals, offering them wealth and freedom from a government they viewed as intrusive, and how a teacher was among those brutally murdered for opposing him. Oyster's reign ended, appropriately, in an apocalyptic fire in which he and most of his followers perished. Only the good--Mercy, a young girl Oyster raped; Ethel, a local Aborigine; Jess, a former surveyor; Major Miner, a veteran and former POW; plus Nick and Sarah, two ``foreigners'' searching for their lost children--survive. These are the people who now recollect the corruption and destruction of Outer Maroo and their discovery of a kind of redemption after Oyster's end--and a chance to build a shining city of faith. A deep and harrowing journey through a desolate land into the recesses of the soul and then back into the light, all recorded in luminous prose. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Glasgow Herald
Oyster is a serious literary work, every word crafted and polished to perfection.


Sunday Telegraph
This powerful novel . . . lingers in the mind.


A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, 2 November 1998
The story is eerie in its timelessness and credibility.


People
Janette Turner Hospital writes with brilliance and originality, evoking a suffocating, shimmering, heat-and-dust filled landscape where truth is distorted as if viewed in a cracked mirror.


Newsday
Suspenseful, heart-tugging and profoundly beautiful.


Time
The mad Oyster, dead before the narrative begins, and the hate-filled mining town, dead as the last page turns, have their own bitter, brilliant reality in this impressive novel.


Antipodes, Donna Coates, December 1998
[R]eaders will find themselves absolutely mesmerized by this powerful, beautifully written, and timely novel.


Book Description
"A tour de force . . . by one of the best female novelists currently writing in English." said The Observer, London. "Janette Turner Hospital's fine new novel concerns a place, called Outer Maroo, which is literally off the map; so far out in the back of the Australian Outback that it has escaped the prying eyes of the Government surveyors . . . a place riddled with secrets, with hidden and nasty history, possessed of nothing remarkable but, as one character says, 'the lure of nowhere.' " Two strangers arrive in the opal mining town--a place of two opposing cultures: the rough, boozing bushfolk and the churchgoing fundamentalists--searching for a stepdaughter and a son who have mysteriously disappeared. Have they fallen under the spell of the mysterious and charismatic Oyster, drawn to the town by opals but also by the prospect of power? Young people in search of a better life drift under his spell and into his cult community. This brilliant novel will evoke the holocaust at Waco, but it is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil. Hospital's "language is fascinating and extraordinarily powerful and her narrative shimmers and shifts like the displaced reality in the heat of Outer Maroo itself." [The Observer]


From the Publisher
"Oyster" has been chosen by "Publisher's Weekly" as one of their Best Books of the Year for 1998.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A tour de force . . . by one of the best female novelists currently writing in English." said The Observer, London. "Janette Turner Hospital's fine new novel concerns a place, called Outer Maroo, which is literally off the map; so far out in the back of the Australian Outback that it has escaped the prying eyes of the Government surveyors . . . a place riddled with secrets, with hidden and nasty history, possessed of nothing remarkable but, as one character says, 'the lure of nowhere.' "

Two strangers arrive in the opal mining town--a place of two opposing cultures: the rough, boozing bushfolk and the churchgoing fundamentalists--searching for a stepdaughter and a son who have mysteriously disappeared. Have they fallen under the spell of the mysterious and charismatic Oyster, drawn to the town by opals but also by the prospect of power? Young people in search of a better life drift under his spell and into his cult community. This brilliant novel will evoke the holocaust at Waco, but it is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil. Hospital's "language is fascinating and extraordinarily powerful and her narrative shimmers and shifts like the displaced reality in the heat of Outer Maroo itself." [The Observer]

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A rank, festering smell hangs over the desolate Australian Outback town of Outer Maroo, so isolated that it can't be found on any map of Queensland. The smell, which the town's wary inhabitants call Old Fuckatoo, is engendered by the corpses of animals dead in the lingering droughtand something more mysterious and horrible, "the feral stench of hate." Dreadful events, carried out under the mandate of religious fundamentalism, have occurred here , but no one dares to refer to them, or to the charismatic cult leader who called himself Oyster and whose acolytes worked like slaves mining opals and serving Oyster's insatiable sexual appetite. Oyster and his followers disappeared in a wave of violence unleashed by evil Dukke Prophet, a member of the churchgoing community of the Living Will, and ever since, no strangers have been allowed into town to look for their missing loved ones. The Bible-quoting, hypocritically sanctimonious Prophet deposed the Living Will's mild pastor and demanded fire and brimstone in the name of salvation. Prophet, a lecherous rancher named Andrew Godwin and the proprietor of the town's only pub are making millions in illegally traded opals while cowing the town's inhabitants and accumulating massive armaments. Armageddon beckons. Part of the seductive power of Hospital's novels (The Last Magician; Charades) lies in her practice of constructing the plot in a series of interlocking narratives, like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Here, much of the action is filtered through the thoughts of Mercy Givens, the young daughter of the deposed pastor. Mercy's precocious but innocent mind resists the full meaning of the brutal acts that finally engulf the community. She and the others in the beautifully observed cast of charactersa schoolteacher doomed because she tells the truth, the parents of two missing cultists, an Aborigine woman, two of society's outcasts who have tried to forget their pastsgradually reveal the terror of people held under the iron fist of religious fanaticism. As the chilling truth becomes more clear and as the suspense mounts, Hospital creates her most powerful and dazzling novel to date. In sensuous prose, feverish with the cadences of mystery and doom, sometimes hallucinatory but always meticulously controlled, she spins a story eerie in its timeliness and credibility. (Mar.) (PW best book of 1998)

Library Journal

This novel tells a tale fit for the millennium. In a part of the Australian Outback so remote it is literally off the charts, a tiny opal-mining and ranching community faces the end of its world. A place of closed minds and closely held secrets, Outer Maroo has become dangerous since the arrival and departure of the fascinating, sinister spiritual leader calling himself Oyster. Since Oyster's coming, certain areas of conversation are taboo, minds are unhinged, and reality seems hard to define. Outsiders are met with distrust, dislike, and worse, while a seemingly endless drought heightens tension unbearably. When two particularly stubborn strangers demand information about their lost children, disciples of Oyster, they initiate Armageddon for Outer Maroo. Related from multiple perspectives and shifting back and forth in time, the narrative maintains the pace and suspense of a technothriller, yet its principal strengths lie in mood and characters depicted in exquisite prose. Hospital (The Last Magician, LJ 9/15/92) deserves a wide readership for this book. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/97.]Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA

Dale Peck - The New York Times Book Review

It is both a rare story and an accomplished piece of writing.

Kirkus Reviews

Echoes of Waco, Heaven's Gate, and Jonestown combine with intimations of apocalypse in a stunningly evocative story of life in a remote Australian hell-hole—a place where evil is as pervasive as the heat, goodness as rare as rain. Australian writer Hospital (The Last Magician, 19??, etc.) sets her morality tale in Outer Maroo, a town in a hot, arid region where droughts are common and a sinister, moistureless fog often covers the land. It's a place so remote that it's not even on the maps, yet its soil is riven with opal seams. These opals, and the isolation, attract folks "who are always waiting for retribution to catch up with them"—including the charismatic Oyster, who founds a commune (Oyster's Reef) just outside of town. Gradually, he begins to attract idealistic young people; they come as disciples, but soon find themselves digging for opals and catering to Oyster's increasingly bizarre needs. A chorus of voices recalls his lethal effect on Outer Maroo—how he corrupted many of the locals, offering them wealth and freedom from a government they viewed as intrusive, and how a teacher was among those brutally murdered for opposing him. Oyster's reign ended, appropriately, in an apocalyptic fire in which he and most of his followers perished. Only the good—Mercy, a young girl Oyster raped; Ethel, a local Aborigine; Jess, a former surveyor; Major Miner, a veteran and former POW; plus Nick and Sarah, two "foreigners" searching for their lost children—survive. These are the people who now recollect the corruption and destruction of Outer Maroo and their discovery of a kind of redemption after Oyster's end—and a chance to build a shining city of faith. Adeep and harrowing journey through a desolate land into the recesses of the soul and then back into the light, all recorded in luminous prose.