Nerve Damage by Annakeara Stinson

Experts on stalking, freshly codified as a standalone criminal offence in New Zealand, say the crime is not a new one but its nature has changed. Where following another person around used to be a labourious activity involving physically tracking someone and lurking outside their home or workplace, now we have dozens of digital tools to pry open someone’s life and fire in constant darts of disturbance. You can surveill and terrorise another person without ever leaving your living room.

The vast choices available to the obsessed – and to the hunted – are fully canvassed in Annakeara Stinson’s scathing debut novel, which has the protagonist Clarice’s ex-boyfriend, P.T., at first seeming to accept the end of their relationship, which comes after months of attempts on her part and a final break cemented by his infidelity.

No one misses him; he is annoying and unlikeable and coldly summed up as a “disturbed bookworm with a lethal ego” by Clarice’s roommate, a slightly older, deeply rational widow who gives the story a ballast against absurdism.

But after the break-up, P.T. starts sending Clarice intrusive messages and explicit videos, followed by a barrage of physical letters, emails from different addresses, friend requests from multiple social media platforms. At first there seems no pattern or point or especial threat in the behaviour; P.T. is a ludicrous, pitiable figure and Clarices needs encouraging to make a police report, keep a timeline, take things seriously. She becomes more uneasy as she finds weird leavings outside her apartment door – an empty shoebox with pencil holes stabbed through the lid, a pair of antique binoculars. On one day P.T. calls 13 times at 7am. She gets a restraining order and sees him in court.

The reader becomes alert as a bird as the world of the novel expands and Clarice finds herself surrounded by violence and chaos; a neighbour couple has frequent screaming matches which are becoming more physical, and people are confiding in her all manner of sins. Her personal history, including a violent alcoholic father, goes someway towards explaining how she has landed here.

But it isn’t all one-way traffic. We see that old-fashioned physical stalking when, in the guise of self-protection, Clarice climbs a tree to spy on P.T after she tracks him to another paramour’s house.

This is the kind of novel that relishes in undercutting assumptions at every turn. Stinson doesn’t lean into common assumptions about whatever mania or love addiction creates a stalker – indeed, Clarice had never found P.T.’s attention easy to hold: “He’d never been remotely insistent about the future of our relationship while we were in it.” And there is a seemingly deliberate haziness about the chronology of events, a jumping around in the timeline of the relationship and its aftermath, that wrongfooted me at a couple of points – all the better for a story about a woman who doesn’t know if she can trust her own judgement.

If this excoriating, dryly funny take on modern romantic relationships and their downsides were to be read literally, we would surely all commit to dying alone. But if we have books this thrilling and bold, this willing to explore the deliciously perverse, and to console and amuse us in our solitude – what’s the harm, really?

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

Simon and Schuster