Book Review: The Roo

Alan Baxter's The Roo is a fast paced, gory creature feature, featuring a bizarre but surprisingly effective monster. People begin disappearing in the small Australian outback town of Morgan Creek, and it doesn't take long for the surviving townspeople to figure out what's killing them, a giant, supernaturally strong, demonic kangaroo.

This is one gory, outlandish romp with the titular roo acting as a serial killer along the lines of a marsupial Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. However, there is a message to the madness here. The Roo also offers a searing indictment of domestic violence and how its ripple effects damage more than just those immediately affected by it.

My only problem with the book is that there a few too many named characters; keeping track of them all was occasionally difficult, especially because some weren't terribly important to the story. I get why the author chose to do this (he explains it in the book's introduction), but the result was still a little unwieldy.