Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday – Spooky Spotlight

Hi, Readers! Who’s ready to get spooky!?

This special Halloween Spotlight features a book described online as The Exorcist meets Bridget Jones’ Diary. Interested? How could you not be with buzz like that!? It’s also set in Australia which, as an ex-pat Kiwi, piqued my interest as well. Always fun to read stuff from across the ditch.

The Author, Shirley Barrett, is an award-winning writer and director which made me especially interested in checking this book out. I’m reviewing the Audible version, narrated by Katherine Littrell.

So, grab your listening or reading device of choice, pour out a glass of Shiraz and light some candles – we’re about to embark on a creepy journey.

Book Stats

Author: Shirley Barrett
Formats: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook.
Price: $3.99 for the Kindle. $12.80 for the Paperback. $14.15 for the Hardcover. $19.99 for the Audiobook, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 304 pages or 5 hours and 41 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Katherine Littrell
Number of books in the series: It’s a standalone work.

Basic Premise

Eleanor Mellett found a lump one day when scratching her armpit at work and it all went downhill from there.

Multiple surgeries, chemo, her best friend getting married and becoming not only a bridezilla but pregnant on her seemingly blissful honeymoon… none of this makes Eleanor’s life any more cheerful. She had to move back in with her Mum as well which, while we don’t get a huge amount of detail on their relationship, doesn’t seem to be an ideal situation. Neither do the cancer survivor meetings she attends that offer fun activities like scrapbooking and blogging.

Well. The blogging might be okay, though she wouldn’t want it online for anyone else to read.

All in all, when she gets a seemingly too good to be true job offer in a remote town, she’s more than ready to jump at it. Talbingo is the town, nestled between picturesque mountains with a lake (The pondage.) and a booming population of 241! Not to mention herds of wild kangaroos. The job is to teach 11 students in a single room schoolhouse and it opened up because the prior teacher, Miss Barker, disappeared out of nowhere in the middle of the semester under mysterious circumstances!

So… yeah. Not exactly the kind of move most sane folks would make but Eleanor is an interesting case in that regard.

Speaking of interesting, Talbingo is full of interesting characters. There’s a wine-guzzling priest who tries to exorcise Eleanor of the ‘cancer demon’ that has latched onto her life of depravity and sin. Apparently. Glenda runs the school and seems obsessed with Miss Barker and there’s Gregory, the charismatic vacuum cleaner salesman older brother to one of Eleanor’s students. He bare-knuckle boxes wild kangaroos. For fun. I guess.

It’s a weird little town.

Once Eleanor is settled, even weirder stuff starts happening. Dead chickens, mangled and dismembered, no less. There’s an old bus lurching around the countryside, puffing out black smoke and seemingly oblivious to how terrible its habit of not allowing folks to pass can be. There’s an old power station that looks like something ripped right out of pulp sci-fi circa 1945 or so.

It’s enough to drive you to drink! Though, Eleanor doesn’t need a whole lot of driving. She gets there in short order.

So, Readers, we have multiple mysteries to solve and an enchanting location to solve them in. Does Miss Mellett manage to figure out where Miss Barker went? Does she ever uncover why Gregory punches kangaroos to death? What about the chickens!? (Won’t someone please think of the chickens?) Does she remain cancer-free and able to turn her life around?

You know the drill. Pick it up, give it a read and find out!

My Take

So, picture this; your earnest and well-meaning literary correspondent (Me. It’s me, in case I’m not making that clear.) is ready to get all kinds of spooky. It’s a cool day, blanketed in dark clouds and I’ve got a long walk to my 9-to-5. I want to find something spine-tingling to Spotlight for you because finding you interesting stuff to read is my passion.

Earphones in with a tale of cancer and demons in a remote Australian village queued up, I start my journey, girding my spirits for the scares and melancholy I’m sure to find in this story.

Ten minutes in, I’m laughing my head off and probably making passersby very nervous if they haven’t noticed my wireless earbuds. Which, in its own nice way, is a scary situation. I’m pretty harmless all told, but raucous laughter for no appreciable reason is always unnerving no matter who it’s coming from.

The thing about this book, and Eleanor’s narration especially, is that the laughs come long before the spooky bits. Her wit is caustic, her sense of the unfairness of it all isn’t dealt with quietly and her take on everything is pretty hilarious. You come to realize that she isn’t the most reliable narrator but only later in the story, so up-front? You can’t help but enjoy her rhetoric. She’s charming in a very rough kind of way and a very sympathetic protagonist.

Once in Talbingo, though, stuff becomes less clear and we begin to wonder if her first-person blogging, of which this book is comprised, isn’t skewed heavily in a few ways. She’d garnered a lot of goodwill with me early on so it was easy to excuse some of her off comments and actions, but as the story carries on the mental gymnastics required to give her the benefit of the doubt become increasingly complex.

Which is fine! The nature of her story isn’t one that’s meant to make you comfortable. It does a really good job with this. Coming from a small town myself with its own fair share of odd characters, I felt oddly at home in Talbingo and her observations were continually funny and relatable. A large part of that is the excellent reading done by Katherine Littrell. She makes Eleanor sound so funny and vulnerable at points and weirdly apathetic in all the right spots. I literally chuckled every time that Eleanor says ‘And can I just say…’ because… well. Who’s going to stop you, Eleanor? This is your story, I’m just here for the ride. The audiobook is delightful, is what I’m getting at here.

All in all, a good read! I recommend it for folks looking for a little more Bridget Jones than Regan MacNeil, but it’s a shorter book so you can easily work it into a Halloween reading line-up for something a bit lighter between scarier fare.