SOURCE: A review of Oyster, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 4, Autumn, 1997, p. 861.

In the following review of Oyster, Bliss finds fault in the novel's melodramatic plot and trite forebodings.

Australian-born writer Janette Turner Hospital's sixth and latest novel [Oyster] is an old-fashioned page-turner which offers up an intriguing mystery but finally fails to deliver either the anticipated shocks or revelations. Set in the Queensland outback village of Outer Maroo, a settlement so deliberately off the map that “anyone who finds this place is lost,” the novel concerns the doomsday cult of a self-styled and shady messiah named Oyster and the effect of his communal opal-mining enterprise on the initially bemused but increasingly uneasy townspeople. In this place where people go to be nowhere—to be out of reach of loved ones, the law, and the government—Oyster and his wide-eyed groupies at first seem to belong as...