The protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s already notorious novel, TAMPA, is a sexual predator whose libido is a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of the mind…to only be fed in secret after dark.

The lady with the deformed libido is Celeste Price, a secondary school teacher who craves sexual congress with junior high student, Jack.

A master manipulator, Celeste selects her prey with a sociopathic precision then proceeds to seduce him and use the boy quite literally as her toy.

But toying with anyone’s emotions, let alone a pubescent boy, is fraught with risks and danger.  Her fornication with a fourteen year old fosters a forlorn infatuation in the boy who fantasises that in the foreseeable future they will emerge from their furtive affair, be affianced and wed.

Little does he know that Celeste’s lust will not survive his maturation, muscle and stubble the antithesis of her aphrodisiac – youth.

But she is quite carefree in crumbling his youth, encrypting his memory with indelible imprint – ‘like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation.’

Celeste’s cool management of her minor is major considering her convincing masquerade as both dedicated teacher and devoted wife of a local police officer. Mind you, her husband is a solution short of a mystery not having sleuthed some inkling of her psychology.

Such is her disdain for this dipstick cop cuckold she finally confides to him that copulating with him was merely “masturbating inside me.”

TAMPA is about the tampering of teens by adults, and the erotic descriptions concerning pedophiles will certainly stirs the pot of controversy – is it literature or pornography? Pernicious perhaps, salacious yes, but in a very well written way, with banality banished and a fascinating study of a fetish.

If, to paraphrase the ancient Roman playwright, Terence, anything human is not alien, then TAMPA is a valid voice in phenomenon fiction