Year of the Rat, The

- Blurb -

Year of the Rat depicts an obsessive personality from its beginnings, until its final psychotic breakdown. It takes place between Auckland and Christchurch. Bruce Campbell develops an obsession with a thirteen year old girl (Lena Kaplika, or Lena Rags), whom he first sees at a communion when he is fifteen. Their paths run somewhat parallel during their teenage years, but at first he cannot approach her because of her overbearing father, and when he eventually does she gently rebuffs him. Bruce tells us variously that he has a B.A. and an M.A. (hons), although there is a suggestion at one point of a PhD thesis. His specialty area, he says, is Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and while the connections between Bruce's quest and the grail quest are not laboured, the invitation is there for readers to make those connections if he or she chooses. There are indications early on that all is not well with Bruce. For example, there is the branding of the girl who is his first sexual experience, or the questionable circumstances under which his sister dies. But once Lena has married, Bruce gives full reign to his obsession, and when she becomes pregnant he understands that the man she has married cannot continue to live. There follows the flowering of a drug-fuelled psychotic personality that has come to see killing as a recreational activity, and a number of progressively crueller and more bizarre murders occur, each justified either as being artistic in its own right, or as being connected to his defence of Lena.