In Fiona McFarlane’s new book, Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $27.00), twelve stories are artfully connected by one serial killer.
The author, who lives in Albany and is currently an Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, won the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize for her first short story collection, The High Places. This second collection is loosely inspired by the real-life serial killer behind the infamous “backpacker murders” that rocked her home country of Australia in the 1990s.
“When those bodies were first discovered and he was tried, the discourse around it was very much, ‘But this is an American thing. What’s happening here? Why do we have an American serial killer right here in Australia?’” McFarlane recalls over Zoom.
“There was that sense almost of a lost innocence. Even though we’ve had plenty of other serial killers in Australia before, there was something about the combination of the highway and the serial killing that felt very American and like a new frightening thing that had infiltrated our culture.”
The arrest of Ivan Milat, the murderer responsible for the backpacker murders, and the unveiling of the volume of his crimes and their specific target — tourists — instantly became a defining cultural moment that altered Australia’s self-image and its image around the world as an idyllic tourist destination. It was a reminder that one man could impact many. “He is sort of like our Bundy or our Dahmer,” McFarlane says, offering comparison for his cultural significance.
Paul Biga, the fictional killer in Highway Thirteen, shares some similarities with Milat — they both cruised highways for victims and used a local state forest as their dumping grounds — but the book isn’t really about him in the way fiction about killers tends to be. “I’m really interested in criminal psychology,” McFarlane shares, but, “it was important to me that the book itself wasn’t especially interested in it.” We do not get inside of his head, or receive flashbacks that may shed light on his pathology, or even directly hear him speak.
“I really wanted to write a book in which the serial killer himself was an absence,” McFarlane says, “and it was everyone else who was affected by him that we spent time with.”
Each of the twelve stories —some of which have previously appeared in literary magazines like The New Yorker and The Paris Review — follows a different protagonist and takes place in time periods ranging from the 1950s to 2028. The book’s final story is a look at the childhood of Biga’s mother. In the other stories, we meet a nun chaperoning a school trip, a politician seeking election who has the misfortune of sharing the Biga surname around the time of his arrest, a comedy actor playing the role of Biga in a television adaptation of his life, a girl who hears about the then-active backpack murderer on the news and begins to suspect her boyfriend, and a lesbian cop obsessing over her work on the Biga case years later.
They are all connected — directly or indirectly — by Biga’s acts of violence and the poison they released into Australia’s atmosphere. As McFarlane weaves in and out of their daily lives and untangles their varying degrees of separation from Biga and the evil he embodies, she impressively captures a somewhat abstract feeling: the way something tragic that happened to a friend of a friend can haunt you.
McFarlane’s dexterous writing offers sharp, evocative descriptors, as when she lyrically describes a yellow skirt hanging in a tree as a “limp flame,” or succinctly characterizes Biga’s pitiful nature describing a misogynistic letter he once wrote: “how lonely that seemed, to spell ‘cunnilingus’ right and ‘specific’ wrong.”
While the book explores the ways ordinary people attempt to make sense of evil, McFarlane also works through our relationship to true crime. In the standout story “Podcast,” the chapter’s text is formatted as the transcript of a true crime comedy podcast.
“I find our fascination with and addiction to them really interesting,” McFarlane says of true crime podcasts. The fictional podcast is called Miss Demeanor, and, notes McFarlane, “it’s a self-avowed feminist podcast” much like the ones she listens to that “are really conscious of the uneasy line that they might walk between sensationalism and respect and responsibility.”
This sense of responsibility is evident in McFarlane’s work as well. Though he lurks behind every chapter, Biga is not a mythic Boogeyman in the book. He is just a man who did terrible things. The story, McFarlane confidently assures us, lies in the lives of those who lived under the shadow he cast and are dealing with the unwelcome inheritance you received as a result: loss, paranoia, obsession, curiosity.
Biga’s strategic narrative absence suffuses the book with a sense of unease that is aided by McFarlane’s decision to tell these stories out of chronological order. With each passing page of each chapter, tension ramps up as the reader anticipates how each new character will wind up being related to or impacted by Biga. We enter their homes, join them on vacation, and drop into conversations with friends. And just as we become accustomed to their ordinariness, their daily routines and stray thoughts, we are reminded of their link to something sinister. We see how radically that darkness infiltrates and changes them.
McFarlane opens the book with an apt quote from Richard II: “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.” In Highway Thirteen, she examines grief’s painfully long half-life.