DROPPING OUT

In de Valera’s linked short story collection, a cop and his goofy friends grow older in coastal Australia.

Narcotics agent Michael O’Neill is getting a bit old to still be going undercover, but he lives for his job. When his superiors send him to Australia’s rural Northern Rivers region to bust a heroin dealer known as God, he heads for the hippie-inhabited hinterland—a popular spot for drug users and dropouts ever since the Nimbin Aquarius Festival popularized the area in 1973— accompanied by his crystal-elephant–collecting girlfriend, Azure, and his colleague Baby Johnson, who suffers from PTSD and likes to read stories about Conan the Barbarian. After a successful bust, the crew decides to stay in the area, where they meet an assortment of countercultural characters that help keep life interesting: Star, a single mother with a checkered romantic history who grows and sells marijuana in order to buy a wood stove; an eccentric, mentally ill man named David and his on-again, off-again wife, Doreen, who recently quit a Christian cult; and later, God, aka Lawson, who acclimates to civilian life after a seven-year stint in prison—at least until he starts to lose his sight. The collection spans the 1970s through the 2010s and beyond, painting a portrait of Australia’s hippie generation as it ages. De Valera’s prose is fresh and surprising, as here in a 2002-set story about Lawson: “On the day he planned to kill himself, the day he’d decided had the best chance of success, he rose at six as usual.” The stories are all slice-of-life pieces, but they’re far from predictable, lurching forward and backward in time and between different characters’ perspectives. (The final chapter, “Another Lifetime,” takes place in 2137 and features future incarnations of Michael and Azure.) It’s such an unexpected assortment of genres—crime stories, drug tales, SF—that it can’t help but circumvent readers’ expectations. It makes for a great beach read, whether on the coast of New South Wales or the other side of the world.

A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.