BEN PEEK The Red Labyrinth. Reviewed by Lucy Sussex

Slim but richly imaginative, Ben Peek’s new novella combines dystopia and dark fantasy to hold a mirror to current times.  

In 1958, Patrick White decried Australian literature’s tendency to be the ‘dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’. Over 60 years later, that tendency persists, and is still being valorised as a dominant mode. And yet, other forms and genres are quietly colonising this literary mainstream. Consider science fiction, almost respectable if in the form of climate change dystopic warnings; or Robbie Arnott getting away with rain herons, or revenant mothers.

Writing the non-realist is a mind-set or mind-game, an imaginative exercise in which the unreal becomes an alternative reality, however outlandish it may seem. Disbelief is suspended. A world of anarchists, magic with a set of rules reminiscent of physics, or humans who spend most of their lives as androgynes? All figure in novels by Ursula Le Guin.

The Antipodean contingent of writers working in the speculative or fantastical are some of the best in the world – if largely unknown to the purely literary reader. Sydney writer Ben Peek has published books ranging from short stories to a trilogy of novels, from dystopia to comics, memoir and a zine. Indeed, he never writes the same book twice if he can help it.

Peek is a writer of much versatility, whose work is disseminated via small press publication – a place where risks can be taken, and thus where can be found some of the most interesting fiction currently around. He takes risks in the work at hand, where the main character is distanced from the reader, described and recalled by an acolyte, rather than a first-person narration.

One of Peek’s strengths is the short form, and The Red Labyrinth is 120 pages, a small enough space to open the walnut of an imagined world. It begins with an immersive fantasy, a kingdom that seems timeless, either from our past or our future. Yet from the opening words the reader encounters dissent, repression, a political edge that is the opposite of escapist.

Zoja Rose is a small businesswoman trying to survive in hard times: a theocracy of red and black monks are at war with each other, and with a literally underground gulag of criminals and dissidents. She has sinned, for she has learnt to read, despite being underclass. Worse, she has been copying books, by hand, utterly forbidden. For that she will be sent to the Red Labyrinth of the title.

So far, so dystopian. Now arrives dark fantasy, for the Red Labyrinth is the land of the dead, where class stratification takes on a particularly nasty twist. It is a penal society, the punishment being that the living serve the dead.

Zoja walked through narrow streets, across bridges, and down stairs, the dead passing her, the monk forcing her to give way no matter if they were human or not. The number of dead that crowded the streets and buildings was so immense that Zoja felt overwhelmed. Generations and generations of people and creatures echoed the lives they’d once lived with sad, featureless abandon.

The labyrinth is a place where ‘the cruelty is the point’, an unpleasant echo of real-life totalitarian regimes. Yet this novella is no 1984, where jackboots crush forever.  It offers that elusive thing, hope, and more, revolt. The imaginative richness of a queen crowned with wasps, or a king burning without warmth, here meet subversion, revolution, regicide. It is not televised, nor will it meet a happy conclusion. One king dead, one queen to go, and that is how the book ends, with battle in the past, and battle forthcoming, no outcome clear. But its message is unequivocal: ‘the only way to treat someone who claims to rule you is to take a knife to them’.

The Red Labyrinth is not like Le Guin’s acclaimed short story, ‘The Day Before the Revolution’, about Odo, an anarchist philosopher whose theories and activism are about to bear real fruit. It is bloodier, darker, and yet the two works are linked by their profound subversion, rare in Australian writing. If somewhere in the DNA of this novel is Borges, then so is allegory. Peek presents us with a dark mirror of our current dystopic times, rich, strange, and a harbinger of hope. Sceptres and crowns will tumble into dust, bringing the promise of a better world. Recommended.

Ben Peek The Red Labyrinth Snuggly Books 2025 PB 126pp $34.95

Lucy Sussex is the co-author (with Megan Brown) of Outrageous Fortunes, a biography of crime writer Mary Fortune and her criminal son George. She has also published a number of works in the speculative and fantastical genres.

You can buy The Red Labyrinth from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian writers, Ben | Peek, dark fantasy, dystopian fiction, novellas, speculative fiction