Gabriel Bergmoser: 'There is a brand of country Australian masculinity that is particularly threatening'
Gabriel Bergmoser’s debut adult novel, The Hunted, is dark as all get-out, an Australian horror-thriller that manages to combine Wolf Creek, The Hills Have Eyes and On the Road, with a sprinkling of Deliverance for good measure. When he first sent it to a potential literary agent, Bergmoser was “convinced it would be too much, that they would say, ‘Never darken our doorstep again’”.
It’s not hard to understand his trepidation. The novel follows Simon, your average, naive young backpacker who is out to discover the real Australia, that “country of tough extremes that had never truly been tamed”, which he can’t find in Melbourne. When he meets up with the beautiful Maggie, he’s persuaded into going far off the beaten track until they run into some locals, out “huntin’ pigs”, who bring them back to their isolated small town for a few nights.
Moving between two timelines, The Hunted explores what happens when a blood-soaked young woman (guess who) turns up at a roadhouse in “one of the more desolate parts of what counted as civilized Australia”. Bergmoser keeps pushing his story further, and darker, until he reaches a graphic, explosive climax to be read in gleeful horror, eyebrows creeping higher and higher, applauding the unstoppable force of nature he has created in his heroine while recoiling at what she’s being forced to do.
“I hit the send button and I immediately just said, ‘Fuck’. I was overwhelmed with regret,” Bergmoser says, speaking from Melbournejust as it goes back into lockdown. “I hadn’t really written horror before, so I was thinking: ‘Have I screwed this up?’ I was kind of flying blind with it. I couldn’t tell with any objectivity whether it worked.”
It worked. An agent signed him up, and he soon had book deals with HarperCollins in Australia and Faber in the UK, and a film deal with Greg Silverman’s Stampede Ventures. “I was sitting there waiting for them to come back saying, ‘Get this person help’, so it’s so awesome to hear that people are enjoying it.”
The book deal was a major change for the 28-year-old author, who had previously published three young adult novels with a small Australian press and won a TV scriptwriting award after a master’s in screenwriting. Of that course he says: “You come out with a real understanding of how to structure a story, a theme, all those important things, but it does sort of leave you flailing and thinking, ‘How do I take all these things and turn them into a viable career?” Still, Bergmoser did make a quiet living, supplementing his writing with tutoring and, he reveals, by ghostwriting erotic Amish fiction and other short romance novellas.
The Hunted, too, began as a novella called Sunburnt Country, following the story of backpacker Simon – a “naive Melbourne Uni student who is very much a thinly veiled stand-in for me”. Stories from friends of Kerouac-style roadtrips about “weird pockets of Australia that have been forgotten” got Bergmoser thinking: “What if a place is left isolated and without external influence for so long? What could it turn into?” Growing up in the small Australian town of Mansfield in Victoria, Bergmoser says he has a theory that “every small Australian town has that other town up the road that they have all those stories about, the little town on the road where you just don’t go, with the weird, crazy old guy with a shotgun.”
But that’s not what he was drawing from, when he was depicting Simon, uneasy but not yet terrified, joshed by intimidating locals into joining in with a barbecue. “I think that there is this brand of country Australian masculinity that is particularly threatening,” he says. “It’s the sense of when you’re around these people, it’s this ‘Oh no, we’re just joking, it’s all a joke, can’t you take a joke?’ It might be that they’re jostling you, it might be they’re calling you names or making suggestions about you, but it’s quite an insidious thing, because it can leave you really discombobulated.”
Like Simon, Bergmoser had firsthand experience, growing up, of the moments where such putative joking turned ugly. “That is something that is very, very common in this country. And it’s something that a lot of people I know have dealt with in different ways. It’s something I have 100% dealt with, and this book was a way of exploring that,” he says. “And that’s what I think really good horror is supposed to do – take something recognisable and push it to an ugly extreme, as a way to comment on it.”
Inspired by old favourites such as Thomas Harris, and by the trend for “outback noir”, crime novels set in the vast expanses of rural Australia spearheaded by Jane Harper’s The Dry and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands, Bergmoser dug into what might happen to an ordinary person catapulted into a nightmare situation. “We all like to believe that if we got into a horror movie situation like that we would be the heroes, we would be the final girl, we would be the tough ones. But in reality, most of us would scream and cry, and beg for our mums, and that would be it.”
We all like to believe we would be heroes, but most of us would scream and cry, and beg for our mums
Then, as he wrote, Maggie began to make her presence felt. Simon gives her a lift, but she, beautiful and mysterious, has reasons of her own for talking him into a detour. “I had this overwhelming feeling of ‘Hang on, there is a lot more to you than I realised’,” he says. “So when I’d finished writing that original short story, I was like, I barely scrape the surface of who this woman is and where she’s heading to.”
So he rewrote and restructured. “She’s one of those rare characters who just writes themselves,” he says. “There is this berserker, almost animalistic side to her. She’s able to happen on the solutions that other people wouldn’t think of, because she doesn’t necessarily have qualms, she’s not squeamish. That quality is simultaneously scary and exhilarating as an author, because you think ‘Where else does that go, where do you stop, what are your limits?’ I’ll be 100% honest with you, I couldn’t have written any faster, it was like I was writing with a kind of vicious delight.”
He’s now written a second novel about Maggie, which delves back into her life before The Hunted, and why she ended up on the road with a backpack full of money. “It’s a little bit slower, it’s a little bit more introspective. If The Hunted is a horror thriller, this is more like a noir thriller,” he says.
“I’m really interested in telling the story of someone trying to come to terms with who she is and where she’s come from, trying to answer the very fundamental question of: ‘Do the things I have been through have to shape me? Am I the sum of everything I have experienced or do I have the option to be something else?’”
• The Hunted is published by Faber (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
