The dry earth will run with blood.After a blue in the pub one night, a farmer goes missing. The next day, a teenage couple both fail to show up for work. Pat and Sheila McDonough suspect something is very wrong in the small outback town of Morgan Creek.As the residents start to investigate, they discover more people have already vanished, and the disappearances don’t seem to be stopping. Before … seem to be stopping. Before they realise what’s happening, the people of the quiet and remote town find themselves in a fight for their lives against a foe they would never have suspected.
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The Roo is really fun, high-octane, vintage creature feature straight out of the Australian Outback. It started off as a lark, based around a quintessentially Australian news story about a seriously ripped kangaroo terrorizing a town, eating up gardens, and attacking the elderly. Author Charles Rutledge joked on Twitter that it sounded like an old paperback horror novel from Zebra, and author and cover designer Kealan Patrick Burke designed the above image in response. Alan Baxter was joking around with them, and was encouraged to then write said book, and lo, a legend was born.
Although it started off as a spate of Twitter shenanigans, Baxter wound up really delivering the goods with this one. It’s a really simple premise and the cover tells you everything you need to know. If you haven’t already figured it out by now, this one’s a splendid bit of Evil Kangaroo mayhem.
While that’s the down-and-dirty gist of this particular novella, Baxter does use the (no doubt to non-Aussies, silly) premise to speak on some serious, weightier issues, most notably that of domestic violence, toxic masculinity, and the ways those forces can destroy not just interpersonal relationships but can actually spill out and poison the surrounding community, particularly those small, isolated communities as found in the Outback. The Roo is a call for men to do better and to be better.
It’s also wonderfully, beautifully gory as all get out. Baxter wastes absolutely no time cluing readers in on the kind of book they’re getting here. This is some grade-A monster horror, and it’s a wild time. If you’re not familiar with Roger the Buff Kangaroo, take a moment and Google him. Now picture an alpha male kangaroo that’s even bigger, evil, and incredibly bloodthirsty, one that rips limbs off men, stomps them to death, tears off heads, and so on. That’s the roo at the center of all this, and his prime targets are names you’ll likely be familiar with if you’re connected to the horror book review community, including yours truly! Yes, dear readers, I get to die at the hands of a kangaroo! (Many, many thanks, Alan!)
The Roo is fantastic bit of fun and a truly splendid way to kill an hour or two. It’s quick, it’s violent, and it’s funny. If you liked the Kevin Bacon flick, Tremors, you’ll love The Roo!
Bloody bonkers in the best possible way. Emphasis on the bloody: nothing like a psychotic giant roo slashing its way through the Aussie outback to get the body count up.
Don’t dismiss it as a gorefest, though. The plot curls itself around the challenges of Aussie rural life: loneliness, isolation, the importance of community, domestic and alcohol-related violence and more.
If you’re after a fast-paced, retro-style horror with a fair dinkum serve of Aussie slang, this is The Roo for you!
The townsfolk of Morgan Creek seem to have an outback problem in the form of a seven foot monstrosity. Written with a blistering action packed intent, Alan Baxter succeeds in creating a Jaws related atmosphere for an unsuspecting isolated town. Horror readers rejoice and prepare to indulge in what this book has to offer…Sex, Drugs and Kangaroo.
Alan Baxter remains one of my favorite Indie Horror writers. His voice never ceases to put me in “the mood”, where the rest of the world is frankly not as important as what is presently going on in my hands – something intense, provocative, inclusive, and well thought out – generally. So, how is The Roo going to compare, given its singular conception?
Baxter explains in the foreword to the novel, that the book’s origins were founded from a book cover mock-up, hilariously created as a joke, to which a group of authors (the horror community) decided a story had to be written around, and the obvious choice for the job, Alan Baxter, residing in Australia. That translates, however, to me, as an In-joke. The book is littered with the names of Authors (no other similarities to the mentioned authors are intended, although if further in-jokes are included, they are based on personal interactions between the parties, and I can’t know that) in the horror community. And that works two ways. Looking over Goodreads reviews, the people that are mentioned in the book and who have reviewed it, well, obviously, they loved it. It’s a blast seeing how an indestructible kangaroo can kill you. It’s an automatic swathe of great reviews.
And that’s all well and good, but how does that translate to the rest of us not a part of that closed circle of victims?
Well, here’s the thing. I have to say that I started off reading the book feeling like I was an outsider, that the book was written specifically for the people mentioned in the book, and that honestly if you weren’t in the book, you weren’t in on the joke. And to begin with, the book felt like name-dropping. People were introduced with complete full names – not shortened names, absolutely not speaking from pov. You wouldn’t, for instance, see “Sadie Hartmann” on a street, surely, you would see “Sadie”, and her surname would be revealed later? So, every time a new horror community member was mentioned, it was jarring. It was once again a reminder that the book was actually conceived for a writing community, and that it was, in fact, an in-joke, and one of which wasn’t really meant for people outside of that circle of friends.
That said – I liked it. The increasingly bizarre ways the Roo went around indiscriminately killing the inhabitants of the backwoods village – it was pretty fun. The paranormal aspect of the book, when it came out, gave a certain clarity to the abilities of the Roo (although I have to say that murky-east-Europe as a source for all witch-crafty things is a little cliché), and the increasingly desperate measures of the townsfolk in trying to kill the Roo made the whole thing more fun. I regret that we never got to see the dynamite in action, I think that would have been pretty funny. Perhaps we could get it included in a “Roo-Two”?
Then we got to the end, and Baxter drops an afterword on us that, actually, makes us aware that throughout the book, he’s been sowing the seeds of a social commentary that is so important that we have lost sight of it in the fun we have been having with the Roo.
And that is why you have to love Alan Baxter.
Even in an in-joke, even in a book written specifically for a group of friends, in a story based around a Kangaroo with demonic abilities and a thirst for death – we have a personal commentary on something happening in real life, right now, right this second, perhaps to someone you know, or love, or choose to ignore (because to accept the reality of that situation and not be able to do anything – well, that’s actual horror happening in front of us). And actually, living in that situation, being on the receiving end of abuse, what more powerful rage could be felt than from the unjustified victim? I’m not surprised the Roo was unstoppable.
And that is the genius of the man. He cares.
Another 5 out of 5 review here, to add to the collection. A pleasure, as always, Alan.
This was a great read! A new creature in this creature feature story and it works thanks to Mr. Baxter! It was great to see all the familiar names from the Twitter book community! Overall good story readable in one sitting!
Demon Possessed Marsupial Mauls Outback Town: “Killer Roo Ate My Husband!”
Read the full news report below…
No, just kidding … about the news report that is.
A very entertaining ‘Full Gore Horror,’ monster-splatterfest of a novella that gets under your skin – very memorable.
Strongly Recommended: 5 ‘blood splattered,’ stars
THE ROO, by Alan Baxter was a fun, B-movie style novella. Action packed from the start, what began as a series of comments on Twitter became an original tale of carnage and gore.
Let’s face it–this was obviously an automatic “cover buy” for any horror enthusiast out there, as well.
I loved the descriptions of this massive new threat, and honestly didn’t even have a chance to guess at the cause, since I was so into the events happening.
“. . . Roos don’t have teeth like that . . . ”
The only thing that I, personally, didn’t care for was that just about every character was named after someone I “knew” in the horror community, from authors to reviewers. While this was most likely done as an inside joke/comic effect, it was very difficult for me to see these “characters” as anything other than the people I knew, especially as both first and last names were used. This took me out of the action too often, and I feel the novella would have packed even more of a punch–for myself–if I didn’t have preconceived notions of most every character.
That being said, the story also addressed some major domestic issues, and brought about awareness of other more serious problems.
Overall, a fun, gory tale with some pertinent societal issues added in, as well.
Recommended.
So this was an ok read. I felt like for such a short book, there was way too much focus on the kangaroo attacks and kills. You already had a fair amount of characters that had promise, but the attention was continually called away from them, taking away from the core people involved. I thought back to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which also involved a small town with an evil entity killing them off, one by one. It balanced a large cast of characters with the violence needed to assert the level of threat involved. This definitely missed the mark, trying to have a similar dynamic to that. I also didn’t love the explanation of how the ‘roo was turned evil, which was just done extremely quick and without much additional information. Again, I just felt like the details and attention were in a lot of the wrong spots here. But I did overall enjoy the story, surface-level, and never imagined reading about a killer kangaroo. The writing is pretty good and you got a decent feel for the town of Morgan Creek, but the flaws just took away some of the magic here.