FEAR IS THE RIDER

A young man travelling from Sydney to Adelaide for work decides to detour a little way into the desert. He turns his hatchback onto a notoriously dangerous road that bisects uninhabited stone-covered flats. Out there, under the baking sun, people can die within hours.

He is not far along the track when a distraught young woman stumbles from the scrub and flags him down. A journalist from Sydney, she has just escaped the clutches of an inexplicable, terrifying creature.

Now this desert-dwelling creature has her jeep. Her axe. And her scent...

Kenneth Cook was born in Sydney. His novel Wake in Fright, which drew on his time as a journalist in Broken Hill, was first published in 1961 when Cook was thirty-two. Cook published twenty-one books in a variety of genres. He died in 1987 at the age of fifty-seven. FEAR IS THE RIDER is a previously unpublished manuscript from the 1980s that was recently rediscovered among family papers.