By GARY CREW (Mammoth Australia; 1990)

Among Australian young adult novels this one, a horror story, is among the most highly acclaimed.  It was actually republished as a grown-up novel in the mid-nineties, and is often referred to as the greatest-ever Australian horror novel, YA-oriented or otherwise.  In the midst of such adulation I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I didn’t much care for STRANGE THINGS.

To be sure, it has an absolutely riveting opening.  Purporting to be a collection of documents put together by Steven Messenger, a 16 year old lad in Western Australia, it begins with the finding of an iron pot and a mummified hand in a cave by Messenger.  Said hand is immediately acquired by authorities, who determine that a ring has recently been removed from it.  Messenger doesn’t respond to their inquiries about the ring, but it is in his possession, as described in journal entries made by Messenger, and appears to be wreaking odd changes on his mental state.

The hand, and the accursed ring, hail from the early 1700s, and the wreck of the Dutch vessel Batavia on the Australian coast.  This real-life historical tidbit (effectively dramatized in THE COMPANY by Arabella Edge) resulted in the killings of over 120 people by ruthless mutineers, two of whom, Wouter Loos and cabin boy Jan Pelgrom, managed to escape justice.  The fates of Loos and Pelgrom are explored in another of the novel’s documents, a purported diary by Loos that describes how he and Pelgrom dealt with hostile natives and found the accursed ring.

Messenger’s story never goes anywhere very interesting, meandering to an uninspiring finish (as we learn on page one, he disappears with nothing being resolved), and the same is true of the Loos diary.  The origin of the ring and its properties are never revealed, and in any event that ring isn’t a strong enough device—or MacGuffin—to propel this two-pronged story.  Nor the other documents included by the author, which include relevant (though pointless) newspaper articles, dull dissertations on cannibalism, etc,, none of which succeeds in livening up the book.

So in summation STRANGE THINGS, despite its exalted reputation, fails as horror and history.  Gary Crew has written many other acclaimed YA novels, and I can only hope they’re better than this one.