When journalist and author Lech Blaine was 11 years old, his mother Lenore would often joke she could write a book about the trouble that lay just beyond their Toowoomba driveway.
At the time, Blaine couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read about Michael and Mary Shelley, and the “visceral terror” these two outsiders inspired in him and his siblings. Mary, with her purple dress and slightly posh accent, appearing on their doorstep calling his mother “Satan’s handmaiden”, calling his siblings by unfamiliar biblical-sounding names like “Saul” and “Joshua”. Michael, sitting ominously in the White Chrysler outside, already a convicted kidnapper with a long and colourful rap sheet. Blaine’s family would grow familiar with the wild, all-caps letters that would appear in their letterbox, and the police cars that would follow a visit from the two strangers who wrote them.
