Angel Rock is a long drive from Sydney, and takes its name from the peak that overhangs the town. The stone face must have looked different in the past because it is difficult to see the magic in the rock now, while things in the town below are little better. This is where Tom Ferry lives, outside the town centre, with his mum and stepfather and stepbrother - misunderstood by his stereotypical step-dad, not getting enough time with his mother who has to work, and not getting enough time with his step-brother. Particularly not getting enough time with his step-brother after they both go missing in the bush.
Pop Mather is the town police officer. He is there when they find Tom, and when they don't find Flynn. Mather has a daughter just about Tom's age, and knowing that Tom's step-dad's sense of loss over his missing son will not stop him beating the returned step-son, takes Tom into his own home. The bush swallows things - after the initial days there is little that can be done in the search. They wait for Tom to recover, to see if he can tell them anything.
Grace, Officer Mather's daughter, once had a friend - Darcy Steele, but Darcy had grown strange and had stayed out at her family station with her unattractive father and less attractive brothers. Six months later, the police found Darcy's rat eaten corpse in a dump in Sydney, along with her Bible which had survived. By chance, Detective "no first name" Gibson, was just coming around from a drunk when he was called out to the remains, and his demons started to eat his soul again, just as the rats had eaten Darcy. It was soon afterwards that he found how long a drive it is to Angel Rock.
Angel Rock is not in a good way - the farms are going to the devil, and there's only the sawmill providing work. The shop and the lady running it are moving towards entropy. Things must have been different in the past - when the preachers did their preaching, when a farmer could afford a Rolls-Royce motor car, perhaps even when boys like the Steeles did not bully boys like Tom, but those days are long gone.
At odd moments things seem to suggest otherwise - when the circus comes to town, for instance. Tom can see magic in the mangy lions in their cage, and for a moment he can imagine a lion lose in the outback - a lion might have taken Flynn. Tom has only once seen a kangaroo in the wild, though. If even the native fauna is strange, how much more unlikely is it that lions are running free. More likely are the feral men, who sometimes appear at a backdoor for tucker, and who may be glimpsed in the distant trees, if they are not an illusion of the heat.
Detective Gibson sees strange things, too, but then he wakes up to find he is in someone's yard with his empty rum bottle or three. His hosts find it natural to be waking up with him. Against all this, Gibson has Darcy's diary scrawled on the pages of the Bible, of a different world in the bush, when his demons allow him to get on with his search.
Things were different in the past, Gibson discovers, as he traces the individuals who have moved on from the town, and he discovers even more and worse locked insanely away.
ANGEL ROCK comes with a suggestion that it is comparable with Joan Lindsay's PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK or Stephen King's STAND BY ME, but they are not good comparisons. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK was unique, and ANGEL ROCK has a major difference: since all of its plots and disappearances are resolved it is a police procedural written with other overtones. Nor is ANGEL ROCK particularly individual today - the Australian setting makes it unusual, but the combination of poverty and misery and the uncanny as plot catalysts has been a regular feature of horror writing for the last ten years at least. Last year Big Engine, the new British fantasy publishers, published Gus Smith's FEATHER & BONE, which is set in a Northumbria just as strange as Angel Rock, and just as miserable and just as poverty stricken.
So, like J D Salinger's Esme who wanted "love and squalor", the reader who discovers ANGEL ROCK will discover a library of this sub-genre waiting.