Imagine a world where every child dies on their ninth birthday – not in quiet, tragic singularity, but in sudden, simultaneous ritual: a recitation in Latin, a communal stillness and, then, a mass death. It sounds like something out of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers or maybe a page from José Saramago’s Blindness, where the inexplicable becomes public fact and human behaviour crumbles around it. But in Chris Flynn’s Orpheus Nine, the horror is cloaked in something stranger: levity.
Having already narrated extinction through the eyes of a 13,000-year-old mammoth in Mammoth (2020), and given voices to platypuses and grizzly bears in Here Be Leviathans (2022), trust Flynn to pull off a light-hearted apocalypse.
His latest novel, Orpheus Nine, opens within the microcosm of Gatton, population 7,448 (and dropping). It’s a setting of ute drives to lookout points, of river swims, bush scrub. After a footy match, a group of nine-year-olds fall silent and chant Shakespeare: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’ The quotation, from King Lear, is an appropriate overture to the absurdity and fatalism that follows. No one knows why the world-wide incident is happening – only that it is happening. A virus, perhaps. Divine punishment? Government conspiracy? Who knows? Flynn, ever the satirist, leaves the cause conveniently irrelevant. His focus, rather, is on the social and emotional detritus left in its wake.
As in our own pandemic-era realities, the town fractures into factions. There are the Orpheans – those grieving children lost to Orpheus Nine, or O9, as the event becomes known. Among them is Jess Ward, the town rebel who finds solace in radicalism, and eventually militarisation, after connecting online with other bereaved parents. There are the Saltless, who believe sodium must be the culprit behind O9. Haley and Jude, raising a daughter doomed to the ninth-birthday fate, fall into this camp, navigating their anticipatory grief with protests – and plenty of saltless snacks.
And then there are the Lucky Ones, whose children survived – statistical anomalies suddenly rendered Earth’s last hope. Dirk Van der Saar, man-about-town and head of his family’s jewellery business, is one of them, clinging to optimism and opportunism. Their stories unfurl through shifting points of view and flashbacks, lending texture and plenty of history to this unravelling community, where apocalypse becomes a litmus test for what remains of humanity: its ideologies, its absurdities, and its stubborn hope.
Stylistically, Orpheus Nine wears the DNA of a Stephen King novel: a town under pressure, a rotating cast of well-drawn characters (though Flynn’s are perhaps slightly less so), a creeping sense of moral rot. That said, this is not a novel of psychological excavation. There is, of course, grief, but also absurdity. The prime minister steps down. Internet forums for conspiracy theorists surge. McDonald’s unveils a salt-free burger. The rebel app Peppr is created, a response to paranoid adults calling to ‘ban sodium chloride!’
It’s these elements – plus Flynn’s command of tone – that keep the novel buoyant amid its dark premise.
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Flynn is a writer who understands the power of the offbeat. His vision is neither nihilistic nor sentimental; it is, in the best sense, playful. And like the best speculative fiction, it uses its imagined world not to escape the real one, but to refract it. This is a story about children, yes– but more tellingly, it is a story about adults: their cruelties, their hopeful delusions, their bureaucratic failures. In the end, Flynn leaves much to the gods, the viruses, or perhaps the corporations – and instead gives us a disaster novel threaded with humour and unexpected, sparkling sincerity.
Orpheus Nine, Chris Flynn
Publisher: Hachette
ISBN: 9780733652271
Pages: 304pp
RRP: $32.99
Publication date: 26 March 2025
