Raw Deal by Wayne McKay is a gritty, hard-boiled Australian crime novel that hits with the punch of a pub brawl and the slow burn of noir. Set against a backdrop of back-alley deals, crooked cops, and small-time hustlers, it follows a man caught between revenge and survival, navigating the brutal underside of a world where loyalty and morality have both gone missing.
McKay writes with a raw, stripped-down style—dialogue like cigarette smoke, pacing like a hangover. There’s no glamour in his crime, only desperation and consequence. Every character feels scuffed and real: people doing what they have to, and sometimes worse. The tension isn’t just in the violence, but in the choices that lead up to it—the quiet, moral corrosion that happens long before the gun goes off.
Raw Deal isn’t horror, but it lives in horror’s neighborhood. It’s horror-adjacent in its bleakness, showing the monstrous side of ordinary people and how a single bad decision can spiral into ruin. Think of it as the Australian cousin to James Ellroy or early Peter Temple—dark, muscular, and unsparingly human.
