Master storyteller Owen Marshall talks to Joanna Wane about the chilling tale that has finally brought his work to the big screen.
"Jill tried to concentrate on what she had left to love."
There's a whole world contained in those few spare words. I still find myself thinking about them sometimes and feel the same sickening thud as I did when I read them for the first time, more than 25 years ago.
The book was a birthday present from my husband the year it was published (it was also the year we got married, but I'll try not to read too much into that). "November 16, 1995" he wrote on the flyleaf. Both of us were already Owen Marshall fans. "Coming Home in the Dark" was his eighth short-story collection and closes with the title piece.
It's deceptively benign at first, this account of a family day trip in the Hooker Valley below the towering bulk of Mt Cook. Tartan picnic rugs and golden tussock in the late-afternoon sun, with just a hint of foreboding in the "shivering rumble" of a distant avalanche and an abandoned Mercedes, upended in a ditch at the side of the road, that they pass on the drive in.
The violence, when it comes, is so matter-of-fact and understated that the effect is viscerally shocking. Author Dame Fiona Kidman rates it as one of the most powerful and terrifying stories in New Zealand literature. Fellow writer David Hill says he exclaimed out loud the first time he read it: "Sentences in it still make me catch my breath."
So, what was it like for Marshall's wife Jackie, to discover the reserved, quietly determined man she'd fallen in love with as a teenager was capable of coming up with something so unhinged in the first place? "Well," she says, "it's probably better if it comes out in a book."
Jackie remembers a box load of copies fresh off the printer arriving on their doorstep one morning and asking Marshall to pick a story for her to read before she left for work. He said she might as well try the title one.
"I'll never forget it," she tells me, over a lunch of homemade soup and bread rolls at their Timaru home, as Marshall looks on sheepishly. "I was absolutely bawling my eyes out. I went back out to the shed, where he was working, and made him promise me there weren't any more stories like that."
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Not that Marshall, who turns 80 this month, hasn't cheerfully knocked off people before. A body bag containing a solicitor dispatched in a bunker is spirited away on a golf cart in "The Undertaker's Story", a new story published online late last year. A tartan picnic rug makes an appearance in that one, too.
There's none of that wry humour to soften the realism of "Coming Home in the Dark", though. And what makes it so haunting as events unfold is that there's no sense to be made of it, either; no anchor for the terrorised family (or the reader) to cling to. None of the normal rules apply.
That's exactly the untethered feeling Marshall was intending to evoke. The story was inspired by a series of news reports he'd read where ordinary people had been caught up in random acts of violence, simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Awful things that happen out of the blue, if you like to use the cliche," he says. "Someone on drugs comes reeling along the street, bashes into a house and smothers the old lady then wanders off again ... And then I thought I'd have the contradiction, the antithesis, of that beautiful scenery and the awful thing that develops within it."
Over the years, options had been taken on the story and several other pieces, but nothing ever eventuated (apart from a short film based on "The Philosopher"). Now, his nightmarish masterpiece is finally going mainstream.
A film adaptation of the story by first-time Kiwi writer/director James Ashcroft premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January — screened online due to Covid-19 restrictions — and a blizzard of publicity has preceded its long-awaited cinema release in New Zealand. "Coming Home in the Dark", the movie, opens nationwide on Thursday.
Fleshed out to frame a whole new backstory, it was shot in just under three weeks around the wider Wellington region, with the Hutt Valley and the wild stretch of coastline near Wainuiomata standing in for the original setting. Marshall wasn't involved in developing the script, co-written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent, but he and Jackie spent a cold winter's night on set and were invited to a special preview screening.
The calibre of the film and its stark beauty belies a miniscule $1.4 million budget. In a casting masterclass, Canadian-born New Zealand actor Daniel Gillies ("The Vampire Diaries"), plays the philosophising Mandrake, inhabiting the cold-blooded killer with the same menacing intensity that made Javier Bardem so terrifying in the Coen Brothers' classic "No Country for Old Men".
"In modern parlance, he's a psychopath, isn't he? A nasty piece of work," says Marshall, almost with the air of an interested observer, as if Mandrake isn't a fictional character he created but rose fully formed from the page. "The exploration of evilness enthralls him in a way. It's an antithesis most of us instinctively deny, but evil things can be beautiful. Poisons might look beautiful in the bottle."
Marshall has published more than 200 short stories since 1976, when he made his debut in the Listener with "Descent from the Flugelhorn" — a rugby player's encounter with a dying old man, set in rural Otago. Could he tell, when he wrote "Coming Home in the Dark", that he'd pulled off something special with that one? "Not really," he says. "I knew it was an unpleasant, socially probing story, but I thought it worked.
"I'm not a great one for espionage and car chases. Generally, I'm interested in the relationships between people. Some of my stories are humorous, some are surreal, some are largely character studies. 'Mumsie and Zip' [a bleak portrait of suburban marriage] isn't a pleasant story, either.
"Most writers are observers, aren't they? They're the listeners and the watchers. And if you're a serious writer, you want to show all aspects in the business of living. Life has its black side and the writer goes everywhere."
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Talk to anyone who knows Marshall — the third son of a Methodist minister — and they'll tell you how lovely he is.
An old-school gent of the first order, says one. "The most charming, sweetest man you could meet," says another. "Yet he's come up with one of the most horrendous, traumatising pieces of fiction. And he never gives too much away that gets to the bottom of where this dark side comes from."
It's true that the genial Marshall is as careful with his words in conversation as he is on the page; in a short story, every word counts. Perhaps, in that way, he takes after his father, a "reasonable and calm and logical" man he drew close to after the death of Marshall's mother from breast cancer at the age of 43.
Marshall, who was 2 at the time, has no memories of her, "not that I can fix on with any certainty", although she's a presence in some of his father's diaries. "Just a ghostly figure, really." His father remarried a few years later. They went on to have six more children and although Marshall describes his stepmother as a hard-working, pleasant woman, there wasn't a strong emotional bond.
"I was aware I wasn't her child, but I have no animosity towards her at all," he says. "I was nearly 6 when Dad married again and we'd had some years with just a housekeeper, so I'd probably become my own person, even at that age. But I had a happy childhood. So often you read about literary or artistic people who had unhappy childhoods. We were a very busy family, not a tumultuous one."
The name he's always published under is, in fact, a pseudonym he adopted at the start of his fledgling writing career. At Waitaki Boys' High, where he taught for 20 years, they knew him as Owen Jones. Marshall is his middle name — and his mother's maiden name. So, he's carried her with him through life after all.
Marshall stumped up the publication costs himself for his first short-story collection, "Supper Waltz Wilson", in 1979. Frank Sargeson called it "as fine a book of stories as this country is likely to see". But it wasn't until the early 90s, with two daughters and a mortgage, that he took the gamble to quit teaching and concentrate on writing full time.
Jackie, who'd brought in some money selling pottery made on her home kiln while the girls were at school, admits it was a scary time. When Marshall was awarded the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Memorial Fellowship in France, a few years later, it was the first time they had travelled overseas, apart from Australia.
Marshall was still at university in Christchurch and Jackie had just left school when the couple first met at his brother's wedding. He was so taken with her he went through every "Hill" in the phone book to ask her out. When he discovered she lived on her parent's farm, about 20km out of Timaru, he bought himself a car so he could go courting. One of the reasons country life appears so often in his work, he says, is Jackie's farming background.
A fan of this year's Ockham fiction award winner, Airini Beautrais, he once described short stories as a direct arrow from author to reader. Now, a whole new audience is being introduced to his broad body of work, which includes four poetry collections, seven novels and two collaborations with artist Grahame Sydney and poet Brian Turner, both longtime friends. A batch of new short stories is due out next year.
Director James Ashcroft and writing partner Eli Kent have already developed a script for another of Marshall's most sinister stories, "The Rule of Jenny Pen", set in a rest home where a bully terrorises his fellow residents who have been stripped of their former status in life.
For the meantime, that will have to wait. The international buzz around "Coming Home in the Dark" has seen Ashcroft signed for two major Hollywood films, but "Jenny Pen" remains his passion project. He's approached "several well-known actors" about it and hopes to go into production late next year.
Ashcroft says people often struggle to associate Marshall's learned, thoughtful presence with the brutal nature of some of his stories. "Owen's writing is very gentle in some ways, but his observations are quite sharp and pointed. When something confronting happens, it really does wallop you.
"Those who know me well know I veer towards darker subject matter. 'Coming Home in the Dark' is less to do with the land than what goes on in it, and that's exactly what I feel about the whenua here. It's beautiful but intimidating. It can turn on a dime and be an imposing force to reckon with."
A special edition of the story features in "The Author's Cut", a newly released selection chosen by Marshall from his previous 13 collections. In the foreword, Fiona Kidman writes of the dangerous territories he explores in some of his most enduring stories, and how we risk a part of ourselves when we come face to face with them.
"It takes great courage to write like this," she says, "to fearlessly lead the reader into dark, deep, dense places and out again into the light, or, at very least, the hope that light will shine."
