FICTION
Deep in the Forest
Erina Reddan
Pantera Press, $32.99
Charli Trenthan is 27 and desperate to leave her home town of Stone Lake in the deep hinterlands of Victoria. In two weeks, she’s off to Venice to work with the world-expert on Venetian sunk-panel bookbinding, a practice that developed in the late Renaissance. After years chasing her dream job overseas, everything is about to change for the better.
Yet trauma lingers on the surface. She is still haunted by the death of her mother in a hit-and-run a year earlier. Shortly after, she was accused of starting a fire that destroyed several properties belonging to important families in town. Since then, she has hidden inside the house she shared with her mother, focusing on her last commission before her European exodus.
She’s been asked to bind a book for the Sanctuary, a mysterious gated community that purports to offer a pathway towards healing for addicts. Yet nobody in town really knows what goes on there. It has an eerie history – two years ago, a young teenager disappeared from its grounds. Nobody sees anyone going in or leaving.
As Charli prods around the Sanctuary researching for her book, she finds herself seduced by the centre’s charismatic consigliere, Zack, a former Marine recovering from PTSD, whose body “sizzles with unconscious power”. He admits that the centre can seem strange from the outside. “There are certain things, practices, expectations that are frankly, pretty last century,” he tells her.
The Sanctuary paints itself as an “intentional sustainability community” and “an alternative to capitalism” that “provides equally for all”. Yet no animals are allowed and the residents are mainly young women who are given names such as Serenity, Prudence, Mercy and Kindness. “We have God’s beauty inside the Sanctuary,” Zach reminds Charli, even as she suspects something insidious going on.
Erina Reddan has written a propulsive domestic drama.Credit: Jacqui Henshaw
One morning, during her daily run, Charli makes a horrifying discovery: a dead baby boy in the frozen lake by the forest – “like a perfect pressed flower under the ice”. Whose could it be? More pressingly, should she risk reporting it?
If she tells the police, she’ll be embroiled in another police investigation. She’s already suspected of slipping off a charge of arson. It’s bad timing. If she tells them, she’ll definitely miss her opportunity to escape to Venice.
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