This chilling rocket of a novel blasts along like the flash American sports car driven by Mrs Price - the glamorous and much-adored teacher at its core.
Pet is a thriller with a serious underbelly. It’s packed with a strong list of ingredients - obsessional devotion, bullying, a locked room full of secrets, a prescription drug addiction and a mysterious cliff top death.
The narrator, Justine, is at the cusp of teenagehood and is struggling to adjust after her mother’s death. She and her convent school classmates become obsessed with their charismatic but highly manipulative new teacher, vying for her attention to be chosen as the latest teacher’s pet.
Mrs Price is a wonderful creation. Her glamour and beauty and the intimate, adult way she communicates with Justine and her other ‘pets’ lures them into putting her on a pedestal and accepting the subtle, and then not-so-subtle abuse she metes out.
As with many abusive relationships, the gaslighting becomes so normalised that Justine is very slow to recognise how threatening Mrs Price’s behaviour is and how abnomal her own her life has become.
The novel’s intrigue is further added to by Justine’s unreliability as a narrator. Her regular epileptic seizures make her disoriented in their aftermath. Is she remembering and telling the story accurately? We know we can’t trust Mrs Price, but should we trust Justine?
Catherine Chidgey recently won New Zealand’s top fiction prize for The Axeman’s Carnival. Pet has been swiftly published on the back of that well deserved success. It’s another cracker. Jump in for a wild ride!
Nicola Salmond
