Face-to-face with another local-paper dead-ender in Akron, Ohio, thirtysomething Nicholas Thomas Hawthorne makes a decision. In a second-hand Boston bookstore he hands over the $1.75 asking price for a 1957 Royal Automobile Club map of Australia, seduced by the single, paved artery that drops from north to south: he will fly to Darwin, requisition transport, and while a few months away happily scouting the great red heart of the country.

As luck would have it, the camouflage microbus he buys off a street-preacher has "never suffered one bit of Satanic interference", and looks set to make his journey south at least tolerable. Running into the sexually voracious Amazon Angie and her retro-record collection looks set to make things even more exhilarating, at least for a while. Or so Nick Hawthorne thinks before waking from a drug-sleep in the abandoned mining town of Wollanup, right slap bang in the parched heart of the continent. Right before be realises his new in-laws are straight out of Deliverance central casting, in a town excised from maps - hundreds of arduous kilometres from civilisation - a place where "when the going gets weird...the weird turn pro".

Travel writer turned novelist, Douglas Kennedy's debut is the Grandest of Guignol - a sort of Race With The Devil meets The Sullivans. Wollanup is populated by four families belatedly fearful, or so it seems, of the dangers of inbreeding. Prime Outback White-Trash, ruled with an iron fist by the gigantic, psychotic Daddy. All but one smokes roll-ups; everybody has a cold six-pack or three on tap. Perhaps a Neighbours bunk-up with Southern Comfort.

This is silly stuff, of course, but convincingly held together by sheer force of speed, the inexorable pile-up of barely suppressed menace and the outright grotesque: the trash mountain whose stink pervades the whole of Hicksville; the feral dog pack that roams the streets; a kangaroo abattoir that feeds the local (sic) pet food industry; a cuisine of "fart fodder", tinned veggies and any kind of meat so long as it comes off a 'roo; Angie's bellowed diet of American showtunes.

It's crude, cruel stereotype time - a Texas Chainsaw Massacre flat-share with Home & Away - vicious, utterly unnecessary and thus occasionally dreadfully funny.

It's also in the first person (and, to be honest, Nick Hawthorne is not necessarily a man to provoke sympathy too readily) and so there can only ever really be two possible outcomes. Kennedy tries to inject a little frisson into the last few pages, but it's an anti-climax given everything that's gone before. It might have been good to see him try and stretch the envelope a bit, push the story off into some more surreal, more fantastical areas, but this is not that book.

What it surely is though is Kennedy's death warrant should he ever decide to step foot on Australian soil again; Immigration must have his picture. If there isn't the ocker equivalent of a fatwa on the author of the disgustingly charming The Dead Heart already, it can only be a matter of time.