Sick

“Sick” is a local and international journey, the story based on real events of a damaged girl whose mind is superior, passions grandiose, and whose murderous rampage is simultaneously portrayed as pure evil, insanity and virtue. A victim of physical brutality and childhood illness, Helen seeks revenge for her weak mother by ingeniously killing a judge and then torturing her father with the help of Sydney’s Triad community, with whom she has ingratiated herself. Betrayed horrifically by her lover, the girl, whose love and knowledge of film is referenced and patterned throughout the narrative, becomes an international film producer, finds wealth, then through skilful manipulation, engineers the death or demise of her lover and his family.

“Sick” also explores the internal worlds of its characters, and addresses the themes of good, evil and insanity with innovation and wit. “Sick” is Dostoyevski written in English. It is Cheever in its peculiarity, but doesn’t restrain itself to a backyard, and has a hint of David Sedaris in its oddly humorous descriptions and interpretations of everyday life. Josey Alexander was inspired by Christina Stead’s “For Love Alone” and by the screen auteurs Tarkovsky and Peter Greenaway.

“Sick” could be easily crafted for script and film as it is imbued with idiosyncratic, intelligent characterisation and deliberate filmic dialogue.

Josey Alexander has tried to apply Ocham’s Razor to Patrick White and thus remain commercial, even populist. The audience for “Sick” could be the casual reader, the devotee of pulp fiction or the literati. It has a capacity to be an airplane novel or to tantalise anyone interested in the esoterics of film, architecture, crime and pharmacology.

“Sick” is horror, comedy and drama.

Is she society’s child or the devil’s child, tutored in evil by a grotesquely miscreant father and a malevolent grandmother, or is she her own satanic, sexually attractive, fleshly anti-christ omniscient and omnipotent?

Exposed to the ways of drug use and abuse, misguided loyalty and the powers of sex through a childhood infiltrated by crims, scums, wastrels and morally dissolute low-lifes and high society, Helen feels compelled to memorize every incident, face, revenge, and every hurt and injustice.

A sex-bomb at eighteen, her inventive murder sprees, at first metered and understandable, become instantaneous and more and more enlisting the fates of evil.

She self harms, forms friendships, loves dogs but then so did Hitler. Beautiful and ugly she maims and destroys willfully. Smart and totally savvy, she is the antihero you envy, admire and want to be on your side next time you are pissed with the world.

Was she born SICK or made SICK?