A dark journey into the dark mind of an adolescent

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At first, Special Topics in Calamity Physics seems as familiar as your favourite dressing gown. It’s not only the Cath Kidston-ish covers and the cookies ’n’ cream typeface: the slow, comfortable set-up signposts classic coming-of-age comedy.

Teen-genius (and narrator) Blue Van Meer has spent ten years on a road trip: simultaneously chauffeured through 39 towns in 33 states and the western literary canon by her father Gareth (political eccentric and serial Lothario).

She is a nerd: the notes, quotes and quirky capitals which sprinkle her story being the on-page equivalent of horn-rimmed spectacles.

Now she must enrol at St Gallway High School, where the “Bluebloods” rule, five glamorous students complete with mysterious mentor Hannah Schneider (doomed beauty and film studies teacher). Though Blue does make the journey from geek to super-clique, all is not as it seems, and the most predictable pitstops (makeover, first date, prom night, camping trip) take her to a dark and surprising destination.

As Marisha Pessl explains: “I set out to write a story with a huge disconnect between what’s going on and the narrator’s voice.”

Although Blue’s voice is as quirkily confident as a Wes Anderson movie (her acid descriptions of high school life come complete with visual aids, screwball thought-extensions and surreal theories), her huge blind spots are gradually revealed. She may well be a “pre-Rochester Jane Eyre”, but everyone around her is in Pulp Fiction.

Pessl captures perfectly the precariousness of being precocious through Blue’s discovery that erudition is no preparation for life’s nastier reality tests.

This outsider’s perspective was very much present in her personal history. “Growing up”, laughs Pessl of her family. “We were very much like the Royal Tenenbaums”.

“I was always an outsider, and I was interested in the idea of being in a group and belonging.”

Pessl has managed to do something dark and playful with these standard themes, catching her high-lit chick heroine up in a swift plot which speeds up, eventually flicking through cult fiction genres like a switchblade.

As Pessl says: “An element of adolescence is that you shapeshift, you have no fixed identity.”

As Blue test-drives her potential identities through this darkening terrain, the book becomes a compulsive page-turner – one of the most impressive things about the meticulously planned ending being that it checks out in every genre.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is published by Penguin, £16.99