Fiction

Down to the River by S.J. Finn

by Luke Johnson •

May 2015, no. 371

Sleepers Publishing, $24.95 pb, 272 pp, 9780987507020

Fiction

Down to the River by S.J. Finn

by Luke Johnson •

May 2015, no. 371

If it were up to Roy Ellis, the town-proud editor-in-chief of Dungower’s only newspaper, ‘paedophilia would be systematically bred out of humans’. That just about sums up the attitudes of his readers, who are disgusted to learn that there is a convicted child sex offender living among them in rural Victoria. Only when Ellis’s maverick reporter Joni Miller refuses to let go of the case which threatens to mar the town’s otherwise wholesome reputation does a more nuanced response begin to form.

Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Wollongong. He has written opinion pieces for The Age, ABC’s The Drum and New Matilda, and has had peer-reviewed research published both nationally and internationally. His fiction has appeared in such places as Overland, Island, Going Down Swinging, Heat, Mascara Literary Review and The Lifted Brow, and in 2014 he was shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick Prize in Literature.