Kerryn Goldsworthy: "Drylands is Astley's Waste Land, with a cast of exhausted and alienated characters wandering through it in the death-grip of entropy, pursued by fin-de-siècle furies and other personifications of failure and defeat. In the small town of Drylands there are no fragments shored against anybody's ruin (well, there are, but even the fragments get vandalized and tossed), and there is certainly none of the peace that passeth understanding."[3]
