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A Town, A Creek, A History: Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings
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A Town, A Creek, A History: Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings
Honeyeater, a “precarious, lush, elegant, and visceral” novel, is one of Molly Templeton’s favorite books of the year.
By Molly Templeton
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Published on September 30, 2025
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There are many places I like to go, fictionally speaking, but near the top of the list is any strange neighborhood—a word I might use to mean anything from Carroll’s Wonderland to the street of fictional characters in H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep to the family farm of The Bog Wife to the magical, dizzying Prague of Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe. Make a place somewhat untrustworthy, somewhat disinterested in obeying what we think of as the laws of physics and nature, and I want to go there. Immediately.
Kathleen Jennings’ debut novella, Flyaway, takes place in and around “a small Western Queensland town”—as the cover put it—where things aren’t necessarily normal, and everyone knows it, and everyone acts, for the most part, like it is normal. But their stories say otherwise. Jennings’ characters tell each other tales that might have been myths, might have been histories, and might very easily have taken place in the space where these two things meet. The stories tell truths, and the stories cover lies and omissions.
A similar layering occurs in Jennings’ debut novel, Honeyeater, in which the stories of the suburb of Bellworth are told by a whole chorus of voices. On flood nights—“the nights the creek makes its own”—the neighbors, especially those from Bellworth’s old families, pull their chairs into a dry part of Volney Street. “We look at the lowered stars, and dredge up stories we once knew, or borrowed, or stole: the hauntings of Bellworth, reconstituted by water.”
Honeyeater is woven of these stories. Primarily, the novel follows Charlie Wren, who comes from one of those old families, and who has lost much to the creek, and to Bellworth. But between chapters, the neighbors come in, telling the kind of ghost stories that are local and specific and yet could haunt you anywhere. The game of graveyard tag. Stories about things in houses, and stories about things under them; stories about what happens if you stay, and what happens if you try to leave. All hauntings, of some kind. Some hauntings go all the way down to the foundations of Bellworth, an opaque acknowledgment that there was something else there before the houses, and that something else remains.
But other than on those flood nights, the people of Bellworth (with rare exceptions) generally don’t look to hauntings of the past, or to the future. And they definitely don’t look at anything that crawls out of the creek.
Charlie Wren, too, is haunted. As a kid, he almost drowned in the creek. Everyone knows how he was rescued by his sister, Cora, who is shiny-haired, successful, nothing like Charlie. But he was left with a sense of the creek: where it goes, and what goes in it. People find his knowledge suspicious, and it doesn’t help that his friends keep disappearing. His oldest friend left, he believes, but the whereabouts of others are tragic, or unknown.
“For most of his life,” Jennings writes, Charlie Wren “had intended to leave. But although he had spent years escaping to friends, to part-time jobs, over bridges, through tunnels, he had never succeeded in moving away.” At the start of Honeyeater, Charlie’s friend Alli is missing, and his Aunt Ida is dead. He’s headed to Ida’s house, where he and Cora grew up, to help clean it out.
And that’s what he does. It just doesn’t quite go as he expects.
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Honeyeater
Kathleen Jennings
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Kathleen Jennings
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Charlie Wren’s life has been strange enough that when an exceptionally strange woman shows up at his aunt’s house, he accepts her presence. More than that, he wants to help her. Grace is clearly struggling, and Grace does not make sense as a person. Roses are coming up through her skin; her body seems made of plant matter. But she talks, and thinks, and feels, and she’s angry. When Charlie lets her in the house—rescuing her from a flurry of pecking magpies—she eventually tells him:
“I woke up by the creek,” she said. Speech was growing easier, like vines uncoiling. “I needed to be here. I knew words, the number on the gate. I knew Wren. Nothing more.” Determined to be, she’d let go of everything else.
Honeyeater has several mysteries at its core, and one of them is Grace. But Jennings is in no rush to solve them. (This, to be clear, is a compliment. She does let you figure out the who before the why or how, which is quite enjoyable.) What has happened to Charlie’s friends? How is Cora so very successful and Charlie so very not? What exactly happened on that day, years ago, when Charlie almost drowned in the creek? And how many other people and things has the creek swallowed?
Charlie and Grace move through Aunt Ida’s house, opening secret doors and finding strange things in the yard, while down the street, the story’s third main character, the taxi driver’s daughter, goes about her own explorations. (She lives in a much newer house, one “built in a decade of hairy carpets and startling wallpaper and kitchens with tiles the color of meat,” a nearly tactile description that fully manifested this house in my mind.) The nameless girl is curious, lonely, creative, and deeply attuned to what’s going on around her, however unlikely it might seem. She comes and goes in and around the Wren house, curious, nosy, likely to get in trouble, a young reminder that long-held secrets have a long reach. Her father wants to leave, but she’s put roots in Bellworth. Or Bellworth has put roots in her.
Honeyeater is a creeping delight, a lush, eerie book in which any part of the world—a bird, a house, a ghost, a shrub, a wall, a shovel—could be there to hinder a person, or to help. (Imagine a ghost. Then imagine a ghost dog leaning against your knees.) The world feels tangible, damp, full of elusive presences and willfully ignorant neighbors; it’s beautiful and dangerous in a quiet, still way, like water you can’t see the bottom of. The relationship between people and the land they inhabit is tenuous and prickly here, as it is in Flyeater; no one really owns the land of Jennings’ stories. They live on it. They hope it lets them stay. And they know that even the oldest families weren’t really the first to live there.
Jennings, who has an MPhil in Australian Gothic literature, wrote in 2021 that “a core motif of the Australian Gothic has been the image of an externally-based culture (English or otherwise) grappling with existence in a landscape incompatible with its ideas, while also actively avoiding dealing with that history.” I didn’t know, until I began reading her work, that Australian Gothic was a thing; now I want to read all of it. Learning that it exists clicked something into place for me, something that stretches through the Australian stories I’ve loved over the years, from John Hillcoat’s visceral film The Proposition to Chloe Hooper’s breathtaking novel The Engagement and to Honeyeater and beyond. There is no one version of Australia, not any more than there’s one United States. But there are themes, and there’s the way people exist with or against the land, its history, their own history.
Honeyeater is subtle about the colonizing history of its characters, with their old families, but that history seeps through the story as thoroughly as the creek does. Grace looks through old news clippings, trying to understand why she’s there, and thinks, “Only one hundred and fifty years. No mention of the people there first, who had survived that settlement, or disappeared during it. Grace didn’t imagine the arrival was amicable: the Wrens and their companions had inscribed their names too deeply over the suburb.”
In Bellworth, history is ever-present, and history is shoved aside, boxed up, stuffed in the attic with the dead pigeons. But the place knows and remembers. The novel’s magics and strangenesses are centered in the land on which the story spools out, where there might be literal skeletons in the foundations of a house, or a yard might take up too much space, or someone might figure out how to turn these things to their advantage. There is always someone looking where they shouldn’t, even as everyone else looks away. Charlie and Grace, at the center of too many mysteries, dig up too many things, and everything changes.
This is an uneasy book but a beautiful one; its sits with avoidance and ignorance and cruelty, confusion and loss, but there is always a balance, whether in the lush flowers, the sense of a warm presence, or the watchful eye of a woman who pays attention to the creek when others won’t. Honeyeater has the balance of beauty and danger of walking too close to the edge of a riverbank; if you want to see, you risk falling in. Precarious, lush, elegant, and visceral at once, it is one of my favorite books this year.[end-mark]
Honeyeater is published by Tor Books.Read an excerpt.
The post A Town, A Creek, A History: <i>Honeyeater</i> by Kathleen Jennings appeared first on Reactor.
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