Hydra opens with a female character up a tree, pursued by snarling dogs and what seem to be military personnel. The fright is palpable, the threat of capture and violence imminent. Nightmare? Flashback? Premonition? No matter: the reader is then jauntily pushed into the first-person narration of Anja, 31 years old (maybe) and inclined to feline brooches (Léa Stein), “miserabilism” (per her “dear friend Beth”) and clever, spiteful observations about her colleagues at Geoffrey Browne Auction House. These are Lawrence, the director, whose “polished vowels, kooky socks, expensive suits and orderly procession of pretty fuckboys” cover a wooden interior; and the fawning, smirking Fran (a “fraudulent aesthete haunting me”), Anja’s colleague, determined to beat her to the coveted rank of specialist.
The cut between that brief scene of terror and this plush world is unsettling – a narrative tripwire pulled tight, which the reader spends the rest of Adriane Howell’s sinister, elegant debut preparing to stumble over.
