Polaroid Nights
About
Auckland city bars, 1996, when the click / whirr of a Polaroid 600 proved you were living your best life. Betty’s is on repeat: waitress till late, drink till dawn, in bed to forget. But partying like there’s no tomorrow is no fix for the problems crowding in. Her ex is back and drinking at her favourite haunts, her flat was burgled and she faces eviction if she can’t pay late rent. And then there’s the serial rapist called the Psychic who’s terrorising women in their homes.
When her ex is murdered and left in her bed, Betty and her flatmate Alabama turn to the bar world to find out who did it. Was it the Psychic – or someone closer?
Polaroid Nights fizzes with the wild energy of the city nightlife of 1990s Auckland. It’s compulsive reading – pitch-perfect with wicked humour and a dark hinterland that chills and fascinates in equal measure.
Don’t miss this brilliant debut, the inaugural winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize.
“a fast and furious snapshot of 90s nightlife – Laura would have loved it” —Tina Shaw
Praise for this book
“With a heroine both self-destructive and indestructible, Polaroid Nights is a novel to down in one go and get a little tipsy on.”
“creeping horror begins to pervade Polaroid Nights to great effect but unexpectedly – triumphantly – Betty isn’t going to sit around and be afraid”
This story works because it is authentic. Rape and murder it is. Gratuitous it is not. The emotions and the reactions described come from a woman who knows the fear and doesn’t get all helpless, or suddenly dead sassy, but behaves irrationally and bewilderingly in a way that seems strange and then obvious in a way I should have seen, but didn’t, because young women, you know, they’re all emotional. And it’s a shout out to every woman whose experience is not articulated because there is so much fictionalised shit out there. The next man who writes a story about high heels clicking down a dark alleyway and women in short skirts stalked by serial killers should read Lizzie Harwood and go find a new topic.
Their stupid stories drown the authentic. This one’s not crying wolf.