‘Pest’ is a fast-moving supernatural thriller with an original source of evil and an unconventional heroine. It’s an interesting mix of plague story and monster story, set in an isolated small town in Australia.

When I first started the book, it felt like a very traditional ‘bad things are happening and it’s only gonna get worse’ sort of story, filled with foreboding and threat. It was the sort of story that I’d normally have been tempted to skim through, like a graphic novel, looking for the existing action scenes. I quickly found that I couldn’t do that because I found the deaths that established the threat too distressing to pass over swiftly while tallying the bodycount. Anna Willett got the pathos right. She made each death have an impact beyond moving the plot forward. So much so that I felt slightly guilty at watching them happen and seeing the pain that they caused.

I’d expected the novel to follow a ‘brave, lone heroine doggedly pursues the source of the plague even though no one believes her‘ storyline but Anna Willett opened the story up in interesting ways. She gave our heroine allies and she did a good job of describing the slow slide towards acceptance of the unbelievable that the main characters underwent. The multiple points of view worked well to keep the tension high and allowed for a few surprises along the way.

I also liked that the story had more than one Big Bad. There was the monster in the shadows, which might or might not be a dream and which, in true Creature Feature style, I knew I wouldn’t see cleary until the last moment. There was one who was part of the life of the town but who was hiding a ruthless ambition that was much darker than her public persona. Finally, there was the exotic stranger who oozed threat even when she smiled. The multiple baddies introduced more complex motivations than the ‘unstoppable plague killing the vulnerable‘ storyline would have.

There were only a couple of things that didn’t work so well for me. The first was the insta-love thing between our heroine and the Sherrif. I saw the need for the relationship and the two seemed like a good match but I think the story would have been stronger if the two had already started a relationship rather than stumbling into it just as the body count starts to rise. The second was the final chapter. I think it should either have been omitted or have been grittier, I could see it was supposed to be a ‘trying to get back to normal after a trauma‘ piece but it felt too light and too neat to me.

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