This cosmic horror story is like a warning from the future

SPECULATIVE FICTION
Bird Deity
John Morrissey
Text, $34.99

As a genre, cosmic horror is perfectly comfortable with discomfort. Violent changes caused by capital? Ethical conundrums? Societal collapse? Perfect. Whether it’s life on Earth or life on Mars, existence becomes both more incomprehensible and more horrifying at the galactic level.

David, the protagonist of John Morrissey’s novel, is a scout with the Association of Chartered Geographers. Stationed on a colony in a mysterious, rain-sodden country, he is tasked with obtaining artefacts from the colony’s non-human inhabitants, known as parasapes.

His money, along with that of the other scouts, is held in trust by the Association. They can void years of labour in a process known as “pauperisation”. Aside from being sponsored on corporate tenders, the only means of leaving the colony is to be allocated passage aboard a frigate by the ruling “Governorate”. David, we learn, is one of the lucky chosen few.

Eager to return home rich, David is unexpectedly contacted by an anthropologist. Sponsored by a trillionaire arms dealer, Sarah hopes David will guide her to the colony’s plateau. She wants to observe – and possibly interact with – the parasapes, or “ashies”, as the colonists dub them. Sarah promises, too, that David will not have to worry about money: her sponsor will compensate him for any loss he suffers as a result of the Governorate’s financial retribution.

The plateau serves as refuge for Tom, the colony’s long-time resident and Kurtz figure. Assisted by Tom when he first arrived, David feels a sense of obligation toward the older scout – though not one strong enough to keep him from sleeping with Tom’s partner, Eliza. Eliza has recently given birth to a daughter; David is concerned he may be the father.

Although the setting’s description as a colony suggests David is a settler, the book does not map directly onto any particular colonial or political situation. With its indentured scouts and enigmatic parasapes, it teases suggestive details, some of which complicate our sense of David: he has a formerly incarcerated brother from whom he feels distant, and a mother he only vaguely recalls, having been taken, aged two, to live with foster parents in the city. The Association’s description as an “auxiliary police force” even seems to suggest David might be read as a displaced native, not unlike the native police the British coerced into acting as informants in Australia.

The novel suggests the parasapes’ artefacts can cause the brain “to manufacture new, fictitious memories” and a different personality. The enigma of David’s identity lends the book its richness. Are David and Tom projections of each other, a la the doubles of David Lynch’s films? David is haunted by visions of a mysterious civilisation that once existed within the plateau. The civilisation seems connected to the origins of the parasapes and to a sublime bird deity. In his recurring dreams of this vanished civilisation, he experiences visions of a caged animal. At times, he observes the animal from outside the cage; at others, he sees that he is the caged beast, “something between a pig and a vicious hunting dog”.

As a meditation on extractive labour and colonisation, Bird Deity is undeniably wry. David is a man with power but no control; agency, but no sense of what he wants. His mercenary tendencies, his dependence on the Association – he has mostly extracted the parasapes’ artefacts and done very little in the way of actual geographical work – highlight his illusory sense of authority. David is a kindred spirit of the characters in Morrissey’s first publication, Firelight: lonely, isolated men surrounded by emotionally distant coworkers and passive-aggressive supervisors. (In one set piece, David meets with the Association’s president, who treats his plan to return to the plateau with smarmy condescension.)

The doom metal rhythm of Morrissey’s writing creates a sense of landscape, animals and people inhabiting a shared continuum, the surrounding world regularly speaking back to the characters’ inner lives. If Bird Deity were a perfume, an eau de toilette, its Lovecraftian base notes and Poe-flavoured middle (think The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) are graced by lavishly Ballardian top notes – not least the gin-dry tone and evocation of corporate life’s sinister side.

Emerging in an era of seismic change, cosmic horror’s originators reflected fears associated with modernity and imperialism through tales of encounters with the unknown. At least one author has called Bird Deity “Coetzee in space”. It’s to the book’s credit that the formulation can easily be reversed. Colonisation, after all, has a way of turning things upside down.

Call it Ridley Scott’s Alien set in Morrissey’s Terror Australis, a warning from the future about what occurs in a world where perfectly terrible things are done by people wearing perfectly terrible smiles as they do them. Bird Deity is an elusive nightmare that lingers.

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