Shirley Barrett's The Bus on Thursday

‘The Bus on Thursday’ by Shirley Barrett will appeal to those with a certain sense of humour, most likely a dark one. It opens with Eleanor Mellett discovering that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of 31. After being dumped by her boyfriend, she gets a new job teaching at a tiny school in Talbingo in a particularly remote area of rural Australia. Miss Barker, the previous teacher, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the outlier residents are puzzled by her sudden disappearance.

Eleanor tells her story in a talkative tone over a series of short blog posts, being far more candid about the realities of cancer diagnosis and treatment, as well as the impact it has had on her mental health, than many of the most "honest" cancer blogs. After recovering from a serious illness, she struggles to find her place in the world, and it's unsurprising that arriving as an outsider in an isolated community doesn't help. She begins an affair with one of her students' older brother, which leads her to learn more about what happened to Miss Barker.

In recent years, films such as 'Get Out' and 'Midsommar' have been released that are classified as horror but also contain some very effective comedic elements. It's unusual to find this type of genre in books, and even more unusual to find it done well, but I believe 'The Bus on Thursday' succeeds in allowing the humour to enhance the story's genuinely unsettling events and the prevailing atmosphere of something not quite right.


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The book begins with more humour and less horror, while the last few chapters are less funny and more strange and hallucinatory. The ending is open-ended and unclear, with many unanswered questions, with the uneven tone possibly representing Eleanor's precarious mental state.

The humour in 'The Bus on Thursday' was always going to be divisive, but if you're not offended by Ottessa Moshfegh, you should be fine with this one. Overall, 'The Bus on Thursday' is a book that divides opinion, but I found it oddly endearing in a really messed up way.






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