Books
The premise to Brett McBean's The Mother is as old as storytelling itself. A mother goes on a quest of revenge for her daughter, who has been murdered. And there the similarity ends with any other novel I've read.

Brett McBean wowed readers with his Laymonesque debut novel, The Last Motel. Myself included. But as satisfying and well-written as The Last Motel is, it surely pales in comparison with The Mother.

The Mother is, like most novels, separated by individual chapters. In it, each chapter focuses on someone the mother met while traveling the Hume Highway in Australia. Each chapter is a beautifully realized study in character. They're like little short stories and the mother almost becomes a secondary person in many of them. The people she encounters on the road are as varied as those you'd be likely to meet yourself. Some are benevolent, some are indifferent and others are decidedly malignant.

The character of the mother and her vengeance-driven quest are the threads that hold the novel together. As we watch her fiery rage gradually turn into weary resignation, her physical appearance goes from attractive to weather-beaten to deathly. She undergoes hellish experiences on her black road of retribution that would drive any person insane. And the mother was already half-crazy with remorse and grief.

The Mother races toward its climax with suspense and drama, but McBean doesn't conclude his novel with any sort of traditional or conventional end. And you'll have to read it to find out how he pulls it off.

Sadly, at present The Mother has only been published in mass market paperback in Brett McBean's native Australia. This is a novel that deserves a much larger distribution. It's one of the best books I read in 2007 and Brett McBean is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most exciting writers in the genre today. Copies of The Mother can be found at abebooks.com and ebay for reasonable, if not bargain prices. I'd say that it's well worth 20 or 30 dollars. I've seen people pay a lot more for a lot less in America's small press.

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