The epigraph for Highway 13, Fiona McFarlane’s second collection of short stories – and fourth book of fiction – is taken from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.” It is a telling choice for a collection of stories that are all linked by their connection to a serial murderer and, more importantly, by the different kinds of grief that reverberate across the lives and places that he touched.
McFarlane’s murderer, Joe Biga, is modelled on the infamous “backpacker murderer” Ivan Milat, in as much as his victims are abducted while hitchhiking, and their bodies buried in a state forest through which a highway passes. But Biga is never present in the stories, nor are his crimes in any direct or detailed way – because McFarlane is not interested in the man himself but in the ways in which his actions ripple out, the impact that they have, indirectly, on people at some level of remove. So too is she interested in the stories that we tell about crime and violence and all that they unsettle and speak to.
