While our heroine excels at school and in social settings, internally she flounders. In fact, Aurora feels like a dizzying descent into hellish spheres, unseen and seen alike. And it is after this violation that Aurora’s life, though ostensibly on the up, begins to dramatically and, to again borrow Tu Tu’s words, chaotically and terrifyingly unfold. It is here that Madsen begins to set the darker arts and mechanics of the “rational” world – and its various religious, educational, socio-economic and political systems – against those of the “irrational”, Unseen one. What ensues is one of the most violating experiences to which anyone could be subject: an exorcism sees the innocent Aurora strapped to a metal table, stripped naked, clawed at and dunked in an ice-filled tub of water. After her lovingly protective (but deeply prejudiced) grandmother sees her dancing and conversing with a black cat (yes, the aforementioned “Master”), she panics and takes Aurora to the pastors of a mega-church. Despite boasting a foul-smelling Pan worthy of a Guillermo del Toro film and a moth-like spirit reminiscent of the spectral forms found in a Remedios Varo painting, Aurora confirms that the deadliest dangers awaiting the titular heroine are all too human – well, almost.īorn to a drug-addicted mother and raised in trailer-park poverty by her Evangelical grandmother, the eponymous Aurora is exposed to the kinds of trauma that make those of the Unseen world look tame. Rather, it’s those who make up the seen, “rational world” (as Tu Tu defines it) who prove to be the real monsters.
But it’s not the forces and figures of the Unseen world who are the most threatening.
It is this interfusion of awe and terror that makes Aurora – and the menagerie of spirits, jinns and monstrous personae who populate it – such a whirlwind of a read. Possessed by an otherworldly “entity”, Tu Tu paws a fine line between fantastical feline and spiteful sprite between the marvellous and the malevolent indeed, between all that is “awesome and terrifying,” like most of the creatures and characters found in Madsen’s second novel, Aurora. Yet you’d be mistaken for thinking he’s a beneficent magical moggy akin to those found in a Miyazaki or Disney film. Lecturing a teenage coven on the art of sorcery and how to tap into the powers of the “Unseen world”, Tu Tu (also known as "The Master", in just one of Madsen’s many playful nods to Mikhail Bulgakov) swings from chandeliers, drinks champagne, plays the bongos and an electro-acoustic harp, and waltzes around a Gothic Revival mansion in a diamanté collar.
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