Brief Explanation
PET is an incredibly unique novel about a girl named Jam, who lives in the supposedly normal and completely safe city of Lucille, with her loving family and her best friend, Redemption. Once plagued relentlessly by ‘monsters’ who tore the city apart, the current state of the area is peaceful… until a monster called Pet leaps out of Jam’s mother’s painting, and urges Jam to go on dangerous missions. Specifically, this ‘monster’ turns out to be a monster hunter… and mysteriously, there seems to be a monster lurking very close to Jam and her beloved life. Yet when she reveals this to her family, she’s told to stay away from any such ‘hunting activities’, forcing her to do it in secret. The book explores the struggles of digging up the truth in a censored and denying world, and Jam’s mission of unearthing the monster leads her to the most horrifying realization of all: that monsters are always just around the corner, pretending to be hunters.
Review
I really enjoyed PET, as it used fantastical elements to demonstrate an issue prevalent in modern society, turning every literal message into something metaphorical, meaningful in a quiet, subtle way. The neighborhood’s unwillingness to admit the presence of monsters within their beloved city leads only to further harm, and the older generation actively avoids any attempt to reveal the truth as they still continue to process the trauma of their harrowing pasts. Pet, the monster hunter, is also an interesting and integral character… not human, not monster, simply a being capable of anything and everything. Its sole purpose? To hunt: monsters. Yet this leads to the question, what is, and what isn’t considered monstrous? If a monster is seen as something that intentionally kills or harms, then Pet could be a monster. The Angels (those who had previously rallied up the monsters in the city to make it safer) could be considered monsters. The term’s almost undefinable quality blurs the lines of morality within the world of the story:
“…hunting down the rogue monster plant that had grown in Lucille’s reformed garden, a stray and secret kind of dangerous. The seed and stems of it were winding through the walls of Redemption’s house, and Jam had no idea how she was now supposed to tell which bits were okay and which bits were monsters, if they looked the same as they’d always looked her whole life” (80).