Perijee and Me

Ross Montgomery is a writer whose novels inhabit a weird world, in which the stories seem to be going one way and then veer off in quite another direction. This latest begins with the story of a lonely child, disregarded by her parents, who befriends an alien creature that she finds on a beach and promises to somehow get it back home. So far, so ET; which Montgomery explicitly references in the first chapter, as the creature grows a finger to point at the stars. Perijee, as Caitlin names her new friend, has some appealing traits, including transforming itself into a miniature Caitlin, with inclusive bobble hat and facial features that have some difficulty in knowing where they belong. But there are more disturbing aspects, including growing very fast, indiscriminate eating habits, and a monstrous temper when threatened. All these come together when Caitlin’s mother calls in the army to deal with Perijee and the story shifts into apocalyptic dystopia, and Perijee, ET turned Godzilla, sets about destroying civilisation as we know it. Caitlin, convinced, in time honoured fashion, that the monster is misunderstood rather than malicious, sets off through the wilderness of Perijee’s making to have a quiet word with it. Along the way, she makes friends with Fi, a feisty street thief in possession of a cow (don’t ask); and, surviving kidnap by a vicious cult of tattooed old ladies in nightdresses, ends up scaling mount Perijee at the very moment that the planes close in for the kill.  How Montgomery holds all this together is a mystery; but he does, throwing in a lot of jokes with the head-long plot and defying the reader to question any of it, even the astonishingly neat ending. The book has enough cliff-hangers to work as a class reader and I’d love to see it as an animated film.