Mountain Deviltry - Stanton Craig

Mountain Deviltry takes, as its canvas, the Blue Mountains region of NSW with its sleepy villages, its colourful past and, especially, its quirky populace, who operate in the glare of the tourist-trap workaday routine that funds the region, as well as in the shadows of their own private worlds. The various villages are an eclectic mix of the retired, the unemployed, the hardscrabble and the New Age: it’s neither Western Sydney nor the Dubbo Plains but both areas wash up onto its shores and leave their traces.

The mystery of the Bush is never far away either, often dangerous and veiled in the perpetual mists – into this terrain who wouldn’t expect to meet a ghost or two? Quite apart from spectres, there are other horrors of an all-too-human sort that exist alongside them, rubbing uncomfortably against the flash and spectacle laid on for the tourists: homelessness, poverty and addiction.

These opposing worlds meet and are examined in a second-hand bookshop, the owner of which values his privacy as much as his books (and his cat), and are investigated by him and his eccentric friends in an effort to bring peace and rest to those “Beyond the Veil”, as well as to those living people they’ve left behind.