Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

Publisher's Synopsis

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further - into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer's home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without putting the killers at the centre of the story?

My Review of Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

In Highway 13, Fiona McFarlane has put together a cleverly conceived collection of connected short stories to build a full 360 degree view of the crimes committed on a highway to the south of Sydney in Australia. Personally, I think this concept works best if you’re going into the collection aware that there’s some kind of connection in each story, no matter how small. Each one is then made relevant by one or more of the later stories.

This collection of loosely connected short stories centres around a serial killer who picked up his victims on a highway before killing and burying them in the Barrow State Forest outside of Sydney. This is clearly based on a notorious real life case in the 1990s and through these stories we’re given a fascinating fictionalised view of the various people who could possibly have been affected by these crimes.

The various different connections come from characters such as: an empath who is obsessed with the case and can feel the victims calling to her; a politician who has the unfortunate luck of sharing the same last name as the killer; a couple who meets a Swiss tourist planning to hitchhike south to her fruit picking job; a wife who suspects her husband isn’t actually working on a gardening job south of Sydney. There are some imaginative ways in which others are tied into this logical jigsaw.

I must admit I was caught a little by surprise with these short stories, unsure what to think by what I thought were sudden endings to each. It was only when I was four or five stories in that it twigged that we were revolving around a common theme and the theme was dark and dangerous. 

There are a variety of styles used across these stories, some of them are very effective, others are a little distracting and one, a stream of consciousness ramble without any full-stops, was just plain exhausting. But in each, the game became trying to discern just how each story linked in with the rest - some were obvious, others were more obscure.

This is a conceptually successful adaptation of a true crime story into a series of fictionalised accounts. It provides a personalised glimpse into how those personally involved in these terrible crimes might have reacted and been affected. Fiona McFarlane, through these richly devised short stories has created a thought provoking work.