Fear Is the Rider

KENNETH COOK was born in Sydney.
Wake in Fright
, which drew on his time as a journalist in Broken Hill, was published in 1961 and a decade later was made into an internationally acclaimed film. Cook wrote more than twenty books in a variety of genres, and was well known in film circles as a scriptwriter and independent film-maker. He died in 1987, aged fifty-seven.

The manuscript of
Fear Is the Rider
was recently discovered among Kenneth Cook's papers. The novel started off as one of four television scripts co-written by Cook, his daughter Kerry and his son Paul in 1981. The television films did not eventuate but Cook wrote the novel in 1982, before turning his attention to his Killer Koala series.

DOUGLAS KENNEDY is the author of twelve novels, including the international bestsellers
The Big Picture
,
The Pursuit of Happiness
,
Leaving the World
and
The Moment
. His most recent novel is
The Heat of Betrayal
. More than fourteen million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and his work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Kennedy was born in New York, and currently divides his time between Manhattan, Paris, London, Montreal and Maine.

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Copyright © The Estate of Kenneth Cook 2016

Foreword copyright © Editions Autrement, Paris 2016

The moral right of Kenneth Cook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in 2016 by The Text Publishing Company

Cover design by W. H. Chong

Page design and typesetting by Jessica Horrocks

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator:
Cook, Kenneth, 1929–1987, author.

Title:
Fear is the rider / by Kenneth Cook.

ISBN:
9781925240856 (paperback)

ISBN:
9781922253491 (ebook)

Subjects:
Horror tales, Australian.

Country life—Australia—Fiction.

Australia—Rural conditions—Fiction.

Dewey Number: A823.3

When we were young, Dad often used to dedicate his books to my mother or to his children. It seems a bit odd to find myself dedicating this book to Dad. But I am very proud to dedicate FEAR IS THE RIDER to my father. In a way it brings him back to life. He was a larger-than-life character and he left a large hole when he died. As his daughter, I lost a charismatic, talented and loving father. The book world also lost the possibility of a new Kenneth Cook novel. And now I am in the happy position of doing the seemingly impossible: dedicating a new Kenneth Cook novel.

KERRY COOK

FOREWORD

BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY

Fear Is the Rider
is a novel of pure action—pure crazed action—and one which is, in the best sense, a scorching page-turner. The plot is simplicity itself. A city fellow meets an attractive woman also from the city in the middle of the outback. They are both from moneyed families. He's driving a small Honda not suited for off-road terrain. She has a much sturdier 4x4. He finds her fetching. But before they can even begin to flirt she announces she's heading down a trail that is noted for its rough surface and inaccessibility. The gent decides to follow…even though he knows that his vehicle isn't equipped for the road ahead (and he is warned of this in advance by someone in the know). But what man hasn't followed a woman down the wrong path? And many a bad call is often made by thinking with a certain part of the anatomy.

Once he is off-piste, in the absolute middle of nowhere, his encounter with the woman becomes something beyond his wildest bad dreams. Because it seems she is being pursued by a madman. Not anyone she knows, or has had any connection with. Just a human monster who seems intent on killing her. And when the gent attempts to rescue her, the fellow becomes obsessed with murdering him as well.

In 1924 the American writer Richard Connell published a short story entitled ‘The Most Dangerous Game', in which a chap finds himself the prey in a terrifying manhunt for reasons that make no sense other than that he has been chosen by hunters as an object to be killed. And Steven Spielberg's hugely accomplished early film
Duel
follows a middle-aged salesman who discovers that the unseen driver of a lorry directly behind him will not stop until he is run off the road and left for dead.

Fear Is the Rider
follows a similar hunted/hunter trajectory—and succeeds brilliantly in thoroughly unnerving the reader in the process. Eschewing psychological insight, the novel revels in its ferocious pace and the vertiginousness of its plotline. Stylistically, it's pure pulp fiction. Its tone evokes hardboiled American novels of the 1950s (Jim Thompson immediately comes to mind). You need to give in to its punchy prose, its B-movie sensibility. Because this is a novel which grips like a vice. We've all entertained nightmarish reveries about being pursued by a crazy (or, at least, I have). Just as we all have wondered what we would do when faced with a deadly situation in which it is us versus them.

Fear Is the Rider
plays on all these unsettling ruminations as it puts this thrown-together couple through the most treacherous sequence of nightmares imaginable. For the madman who is hunting them is, more than anything, a cunning, relentless animal who will not stop until his quarry have fallen victim to him. His wild determination to kill becomes almost mythic in its wholesale savagery.

This nameless, near-faceless beast—for that is the right word—has none of the values we associate with the so-called civilised world. He is man at his most primal and basic, and his need to kill is never probed, explained, rationalised. That is one of the many genius flourishes of the book: there is nothing psychologically or emotionally cogent about his homicidal impulse. It is simply a need to destroy, whatever the cost (and, without giving too much away, this is a tale where innocent bystanders get swept up in the deranged action).

Cook offers scant detail about his two protagonists. They are urban blow-ins way out of their depth, but they learn quickly how to survive. So ignore the occasional woodenness of their dialogue, and that you get to know little about them. This novel is a wild ride—and one which gives, with visceral accuracy, a true sense of what it means to find yourself terrifyingly overwhelmed by the outback. No one writes better about this cruel, unforgiving terrain. And without ever trying to give meaning to the barbarism on display here, Kenneth Cook raises all sorts of primordial questions about how the civilised world has no choice but to match savagery with savagery.

Fear Is the Rider
also serves as a reminder that, in an increasingly over-connected, monocultural world, the Australian outback remains one of the last great tabula rasas: a place where all the darkest primal dramas of the human condition can be played out in the middle of nowhere, under an unforgiving sun.

There was a girl running out of the scrub towards him. The temperature was fifty degrees centigrade, there wasn't a house within two hundred kilometres and a girl was running out of the scrub. The sun was lost in its own glare and the desert surrounding the scrub was heat-whitened. Little puffs of dust rose from the girl's feet as she ran towards his car. He slowed down.

‘Don't leave your car,' they'd told him, ‘don't leave your car whatever happens. The sun'll kill you in two hours.'

A girl running under the deadly sun, out here, two thousand kilometres west of Sydney, fifteen hundred south of Darwin, a thousand north of Adelaide.

She was terrified. He could see, feel, the fear on her face before he recognised her. Katie, the girl he'd met on the road out from Sydney. She was wearing the same shorts and yellow blouse she had been wearing when he last saw her.

He stopped and was leaning across to open the passenger door when she reached the car, wrenched the door open and flung herself in.

She didn't look at him, just stared fearfully through the windscreen into the scrub of the dried waterway.

‘Drive, drive away quickly!' She was almost shrieking.

‘What?'

‘Drive. Drive on. Drive!'

Her terror was compelling. He slammed the car into gear and drove fast along the bumpy, stony track.

‘What…?' he began again.

‘I'll tell you, but get us out of here, for God's sake get us out of here quick!'

She was still staring wildly into the scrub. Her fear seeped into his spine. There was something there, in the low trees, something terrible.

He struggled with the steering as the wheels slewed on the sand and moving stones of the track.

‘Faster, please go faster.'

‘I can't go any faster,' he said irritably. ‘This car wasn't made for the outback.'

But he went faster, infected by the girl's fear, afraid himself of the unknown thing in the scrub.