Hydra by Adriane Howell
“I’d started double locking the house, parking the car two leaps from the front door, steering clear of the cliffside stairs and sleeping in pyjamas with a knife under my pillow. It wasn’t so unusual - how many other women slept clothed, head resting upon a weapon? I obeyed this ritual. Tended to it sincerely and piously. I couldn’t control my land, but I did reign over my behaviour.”
Hydra (2022), Adriane Howell’s debut novel, opens with a fast-paced scene full of action: an unknown female races through the bush as barking dogs grow ever closer. Hiding in a tree, something pierces her ribs, and she falls to the ground, a man hovers over her as fighter jets tear across the sky.
Who is she? Why is she being chased? What’s with the fighter jets?
This short opening vignette is a teaser to the story that’s about to unravel, along with our narrator, Anja. An ambitious antiquarian, the story moves to her returning to work after a holiday to Greece with her husband - only now she’s no longer wearing her wedding ring.
There’s no denying that Anja is a bit of a snob. Dedicated to her role, she’s committed to securing a senior specialist position, so she can introduce her own way of categorising objects based on the emotional responses they elicit. The only thing standing in her way is her equally snobbish colleague, Fran – a “fraudulent aesthete haunting me”.
When a valuation at a house goes awry, Anja finds herself jobless and adrift, uncertain how to move forward. That is until she finds stumbles across a 100-year lease for a beachside cottage located on the Mornington Peninsula on disused land owned by the local naval base.
Not knowing what else to do, she purchases the lease and moves in. This is when things really start to become unhinged.
Howell elegantly weaves together several mysteries with mounting tensions and a superb gothic-thriller edge. Interspersed with Anja’s narration are old transcripts from the naval base from an old investigation into disturbing goings-on:
“Look, you asked for my story, and that’s it. I know you were sent here because upper rank thinks it’s some disturbed vigilante or cadet, but I’m telling you, this wasn’t human.”
The attending officer leading the investigation also stayed in the same cottage Anja now resides in. Local myths and folklore swell, leaving Anja - and the reader - to question what’s really happening - is it real or is it all in Anja’s head?
I don’t want to give too much away here as when the scares come; they’re exceptionally well written - safe to say, there are a few scenes that will definitely have you checking to ensure your doors are locked.
From the outset, Howell does an excellent job building our relationship with Anja. An unreliable narrator and somewhat unlikeable in her holier-than-thou attitude, there’s still something to how she speaks to us that reels you in. She’s aloof and angry but also confessional and intimate, inviting the reader into her thoughts with a clever ‘but I don’t think you’re like that’ undertone.
Despite her obvious intellect and self-awareness, Anja refuses to take responsibility for her increasingly erratic behaviour:
“My judgement, I admit, had been a little off, though I wasn’t convinced the incident was my fault. After all, in the string of events, with actions leading to reactions (stand up, sit down, chair gone), I’d only taken my place in the line.”
The further into the mystery we delve, the further from sanity Anja seems to wander, but we’re given further insights into how she has come to be this way: we learn about her estranged father and a fractured relationship with her deceased mother, what happened to her marriage in Greece, and the unyielding sense of loneliness that permeates Anja’s character.
I loved that Howell didn’t lean too hard into the ‘sad girl novel’ trope and injects Anja with a delicious dose of dark humour. She’s the kind of person you could care for but would pretend to be busy if she phoned you during the week.
Hydra is a wickedly good debut with a premise and structure that shouldn’t work but ultimately does. Even though the big reveal felt a tiny bit of a letdown, it also felt right for the strong sense of place and lingering Australiana obsessions that Howell captures so well.
Elaine Chennatt is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
