Wiretap Newsletter - Vol. 1

Wiretap is a monthly collection of the things I can’t stop thinking about. Crime, Thriller, and Horror fiction. TV and Cinema. True crime. Music. Quotes. Strange people. Bad decisions. Cultural debris recovered from dim corners of the internet and sodium-lit streets.

Each edition will contain updates on whatever I’ve been working on, reading, watching, listening to, or obsessing over during the month. Some of it brutal. Some of it intelligent. Occasionally both at once. Expect updates and insights into the writing and manuscript submission process, essays, underground music, and the sort of stories that leave fingerprints behind.

No productivity advice. No optimisation culture. No motivational sermons. Just signals intercepted from the shadows once a month.

My debut novel, DOGWATCH is available now.

Ania Ahlborn creates a specific brand of misery in Brother. The narrative feels contaminated, humid, mean, and claustrophobic. Every page carries the sense that something rotten has already happened, and something worse waits nearby. Ahlborn writes with the confidence of someone dragging you deeper into the woods while refusing to explain where the path ends. It leaves grime under your fingernails as you turn pages.

Completing the book confirms the initial rot that’s set up beautifully from the outset. The narrative escalates into one of the most depraved, confronting stories in modern horror. During the final chapter, time dilates. The world narrows to the page as the tension stretches out, trapping you completely inside the [this section has been redacted for spoilers, sorry; couldn’t do it to you].

It is truly a stunning, deeply unsettling execution of psychological violence that I found highly inspirational. This book demands recommendation, even if you need a shower after every chapter.

Earlier this month, I finished Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby. Fast, violent, sharp-edged Southern crime fiction with a V8 engine under the hood. The whole novel moves with the momentum of a bad decision made at high speed. Cosby understands desperation. More importantly, he understands how quickly desperation turns into momentum and he knows how to execute it. Following that, I also tore through Dead in the Water by John Marrs in about a week, which felt engineered for compulsive reading. Slick, tense, and full of the sort of escalating paranoia that keeps you saying “one more chapter” until it’s suddenly 1:14 a.m. and your judgement has collapsed entirely. Pure airport-thriller energy but executed with enough confidence that I didn’t care. Following Brother, I have started reading Guess Again by Charlie Donlea. More on that next month.

Most of this month’s soundtrack has leaned heavily toward the new releases from Immolation, Gaerea, and Ingested.

Immolation still sound like they’re broadcasting from beneath collapsed cathedrals. There’s something suffocating about their records that works beautifully. Dense, punishing, deliberate. Metal that feels ancient rather than performative.

Gaerea continue operating in that space between modern black metal and emotional collapse. Everything sounds massive and distant at the same time, like panic attacks recorded inside abandoned warehouses. There’s real atmosphere there beyond the aesthetic.

Then there’s Ingested, which feels less interested in atmosphere and more interested in blunt force trauma. No subtlety. No elegance. Just breakdowns hitting like concrete slabs through a windscreen. Exactly the right energy.

Towards the end of the month, I’ve been thrashing Defeated Sanity non-stop. The filth is definitely helping me close out my WIP.

He drives through the morning glare where the suburbs thin out. The radio hums about roadworks, heat, and something about a missing man near Gunnedah. It sounds like background noise until you remember how often people vanish out here.

Australia hides its dead well.

You could start in the cities, where the stories wear suits. White-collar crimes dressed in language about compliance and procurement. Contracts carved to bleed quietly. A bribe buried in a consultancy fee. A death behind an industrial gate reported as “incident under review.” Every building has a silence clause somewhere between the foundations.

Move outward. The highways carry ghosts. Truck stops where drivers once went missing. Gravel shoulders littered with crosses and fading plastic flowers. A girl dumped near Tennant Creek. A boy who never made it past Mount Isa. The cops file the paperwork. The weather erases the rest.

Every few years, someone writes another think piece about the Australian character. Mateship. Sunburn. Resilience. But you don’t have to look far to see what’s missing from that myth. The country was built by hiding the evidence. First the frontier killings, written off as “dispersals.” Then the stolen children, moved like freight between missions and homes. Later, the industrial disasters, the asbestos pits, the youth jails with no cameras.

You could pick any decade in Australian history and you’ll find a cover-up… or several.

The bush carries its own archive. Old diggings full of mercury and bone. Ghost towns with pubs older than the police stations that forgot them. At night, when the heat drops, the wind hums through broken flyscreens like someone trying to remember a name.

In Victoria, Peter Temple wrote about men who broke under weather and work. He knew that guilt wasn’t an event but a season. His detectives were less about justice than endurance. In Brisbane, Trent Dalton turns childhood trauma into colour and faith and love. Jane Harper gives us drought as motive. Garry Disher kept the criminals close to home, because they always are. These writers aren’t describing crime as deviation. They’re writing about how the country functions.

Australia doesn’t solve its crimes. It absorbs them.

Every election brings a promise of reform, inquiry, renewal. Then the next week, another Royal Commission uncovers the same thing dressed in new uniforms. The same notes, same excuses. The people change names; the systems don’t.

If you listen long enough in any warehouse, pub, or smoko room, you hear smaller versions of the same story. Someone gets hurt, no one reports it. A machine breaks, a foreman covers it. An invoice gets “adjusted.” A subcontractor pockets the difference. Crimes scaled to fit ordinary lives. Not enough to make headlines, but enough to stain a conscience.

This is how a nation keeps its quiet.

In Perth, the heat burns so clean you could almost believe in innocence. In Adelaide, the limestone glows like nothing bad ever happened under it. In Brisbane, the river reflects whatever story the city wants to tell that week. Yet dig under any of them and the same pattern repeats: bodies traded for progress, evidence washed down drains, justice delayed until the living stop asking.

The real violence isn’t what’s done, but what’s normalised.

Every manager who signs off an injury as “incident closed.” Every executive who calls fraud “loss recovery.” Every cop who says “no suspicious circumstances” before they even check the scene. The language of Australia’s guilt is procedural. It doesn’t shout. It files.

Even the landscape joins in. Salt pans eat old camps. Fire erases proof. The desert keeps what the cities refuse to remember. That’s why crime stories matter here. They’re not entertainment. They’re testimony.

You see it in the way Australian crime fiction keeps circling the same terrain; missing kids, vanished women, corrupt cops, towns with secrets. Because the country itself is the cold case. Every story is a field report from the investigation no one finished.

Drive long enough and you’ll feel it. The change in the air when you pass an abandoned servo or a half-buried sign. The stillness that says something was cleaned up too neatly. You start to understand that the nation’s conscience isn’t buried under guilt but under paperwork.

The old crimes never closed. They were reclassified.

When night falls, the city lights look clean from a distance. The cranes over the river keep building, the suburbs keep spreading, the headlines move on. But if you stop, if you listen, you can still hear the machines hum in the dark; the ones that turn silence into progress, the ones that built the country.

Australia is a crime scene. Not metaphorically. Geographically. You can map it by its evidence: burnt-out car, missing ledger, sealed file, unmarked grave. Every new suburb sits on top of someone else’s omission.

The trick is learning how to see it without blinking.