lip lit: hades
The man underworld dwellers call Hades has a knack for making things disappear beneath the decomposing heaps of his junkyard. But when two dying orphans are delivered to him in the dead of night, he takes pity and raises them as his own.
Twenty years later, there is a killer on the loose in Sydney, stealing vital organs from the healthy and giving them to the sick. It’s Detective Frank Bennett’s first case since being transferred to Sydney Metro Homicide Squad, and he’s determined to catch the killer before another victim goes under the knife.
There’s something off about Bennett’s new partner, Eden Archer. She’s smart, beautiful and enigmatic and Bennett is as drawn to her as he is repelled by her brother Eric, who also serves on the force. But the closer Frank gets to the Archer siblings, the more he suspects the killer isn’t the only one on a dark mission.
Unlike traditional crime fiction, in Hades the line between good and evil is blurred. Hades, body disposal expert for hire, is capable of great love and compassion, building strange and beautiful sculptures out of his scrap heap and raising his adopted children.
The Archer siblings, raised by Hades after witnessing their parents’ murder, seek to help the helpless but share a killer instinct and a desire for revenge. The killer gifts health to the terminally ill, but at a terrible price and the recipients of these ‘gifts’ must give him permission to take a life to save their own. This raises intriguing questions: what is a life worth? Are some lives worth more than others? Is murder ever justified?
The narrative shifts between the police investigation, the killer and his next potential victim, with occasional flashbacks to the Archer siblings’ childhood in Hades’ junkyard. Keeping track is initially confusing as author Candice Fox takes time to establish who’s who and where they fit in the narrative.
In this, Bennett seems an odd choice to narrate much of the story, given he is unaware of the Archers’ past when the reader is. It would perhaps have made more sense to give Eden a voice. That said, Bennett is the most relatable of the central characters and offers the reader a safe way into Fox’s violent and terrifying world.
Eden and Eric are by far Hades’ most intriguing and complex characters. The scenes detailing their unusual childhood and unorthodox education are the most vivid and unsettling in the book, and I would have liked to follow them more closely in their adult lives as they carry out their mission.
However, while the siblings’ dark urges have clear roots in the trauma they suffer as young children, other characters appear to lack convincing motivation for their crimes: most notably the parents of a terminally ill child who sacrifice one daughter to save the other, telling the police that she was ‘just a fucking brat,’ and, ‘We just switched them. They belong to us and we can do what we goddamn want with them.’
There are other occasional niggling logic flaws that somewhat distract from what is otherwise a thrilling read. Most notably, a woman manages to escape the killer’s clutches only to end up in hospital being treated for severe blisters after walking six kilometres through the bush in ‘a set of heels that Naomi Campbell would have had trouble walking in’. Why on earth didn’t she just take her shoes off?
Quibbles aside, Hades is a dark and frightening rabbit warren of a read that will resonate particularly well with Dexter fans and anyone with a taste for the macabre.
