Mike Johnson: Stench

Reviewed by LAURENCE JENKINS

Mike Johnson, author of 1996 Buckland Prize-winner Dumb Show and nine other books,
has concocted a fantasy thriller in Stench, which seems to me to be a send-up of that Enid Blyton genre on which so many readers were once hooked. It's a cruel, not an affectionate, tribute, though, and not to everyone's taste, I would have to guess.

Blyton's Famous Five are replaced here by a group of teenage misfits: Psychopath Josie; her willing slave, Adrian, whose heroes are the Orcs he models and paints at home in the room he shares with his sister; Carpenter, the fat, bespectacled nerd who most resembles something out of Blyton; Baby, the sister who accompanies Adrian everywhere, and through whose thoughts the story is told; and Rachel, who rivals Josie for Adrian's dubious charms.

Hikitarua, a fictional, forgotten South Island town gets woken out of
its apathy when teenagers start to
disappear. Josie has run away and her hold on Adrian (and Baby and Carpenter; they always seem to be together) has them break into the town's derelict hospital to hide her. There they discover the stench of the title, coming from under a trapdoor, which they uncover and then manage to delay opening for the entire book.

The cabal dance attendance on Josie to keep her hidden, her claim that her brother and just about everyone else has raped her and her threats of suicide keeping them in line.

It's soon apparent (or is it?) that she's practically constructed of lies, and Rachel, the kind one, becomes inextricably entangled with both her and Adrian while Baby and Carpenter look on,
helplessly disempowered.

The clever device of having the
narrator, Baby, hiding behind the mask of a retard makes it possible for Johnson to manipulate his audience through
a sort of metamorphosis — empathy turning to distrust. Everything starts to fly apart about halfway through the
narrative, and from that point on you're never sure exactly what's actually
happening. One begins to suspect that Baby's not at all in command of her actions, much less her faculties, and what was trustworthy becomes dubious in her telling of the tale.

It's difficult to say if this is meant as some sort of allegory or intended as metaphor, because if there is a point to make, it's never made. It's an interesting, if ultimately unsatisfactory, read. Fans of Johnson will probably get something out of this novel, but I doubt it will make him any new ones.

* Hazard Press, $24.95

* Laurence Jenkins is
a Northland-based writer, reviewer and arts columnist.