The Passengers: Book III of the Underwater God Trilogy

By Randal J. Junior

A collage of conflicted relationships takes shape as two brothers take on the responsibilities of work, love, family and loss. Their respective partners are very different kinds of women, just as Darby and Bro are very different sides of the same coin, still spinning in slow motion as they fall to earth. Their friends, family and their love of cars, football and Friday nights at the pub are the glue that holds them together, even as they push each other away. Theirs is not to cherish and to hold, to love and to learn; theirs is to taste the bitterness of estrangement.
'The Underwater God' is a journey through small-town Australia, a journey through the rolling, green fields of the southern wheat-belt in spring-time, to the kitchen table at Mum's place. It's a journey to an out-back boxing tent in the Dead Heart, and to a nondescript cell in a high-security prison. Poker machines become fantastical creatures of myth as day-time television morphs with Shakespearean melodrama, and the perfect wave is caught and ridden into a hellish miasma of drug-abuse and failed relationships.
This book reflects the true underbelly of modern culture, where gangsters are skinny teenagers wearing Eminem shirts and riding skateboards. Where drug-lords live in council flats, watching pay-tv and eating fat pizza. Bongs, cones, grams of speed, eccy's and trips are now the bywords in a sub-culture that has quickly spread it's tentacles into the daily life of millions of Australians and New Zealanders, who even if they never touch the stuff, will know someone who has. And all this has happened over the last forty years with scarce mention of any but the biggest drug hauls and the most sensational overdoses.
Illicit drug-use is now common from the age of fifteen. Both the fear of sexual predators and that of being 'unsexy' is reinforced on a daily basis by the mass media. No one stops to see if a stranger is okay. We are strangers not only to each other, but strangers to ourselves in this world where the media has become god, shaping our lives, our choices and our future.
And for those who fall through the cracks; the underwater god is waiting...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randal J. Junior
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370779758

Randal J. Junior

As a student of literature for the past eight years, the author has endeavoured to learn the art of compression; reducing the infinite into the barest minimum of words required to hook the reader’s interest, cast doubt within their mind and then dispel it with either an inconclusive twist or an enduring sense of finality. As a failed student of philosophy, Randal J. Junior has been beaten into the school of weary acceptance after finding that all human endeavour is fraught with either idealism or an opportunistic narcissism. But she/he still has faith in humanity and believes that we all learn something new every day.

Book preview

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