CATHERINE JINKS Panic. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

In her new novel, Panic, Catherine Jinks provides a timely take on online mobs, conspiracy theorists, and sovereign citizens.

Bronte is a young woman who, along with most of her generation, records pretty much everything about her life online. One drunken rant, though, posted after she found out her boyfriend was cheating on her with her flatmate, has sent her life spiralling out of control. ‘Pussybugs Girl’, as she’s nicknamed, is targeted in an organised, and particularly vicious, harassment campaign.

Being abused and vilified online is one thing, but the threat gets more personal when she’s drugged and filmed on a train. Trying to report it to the New South Wales police, however, doesn’t go so well.

‘Yesterday I was on the train and I blacked out. And when I woke up, I was at Central station.’ My voice started to wobble. I could still feel the horror of that moment – the grogginess, the nausea, the realisation I’d overshot my station by a whole hour …

‘At first I thought I had the flu, but then something happened.’ I swallowed. Braced myself. ‘Someone filmed me while I was out cold, and posted the video on Instagram. I was just lying there, snoring and drooling. I looked dead drunk, even though I wasn’t.’

Her drunken rant about Callum’s unfaithfulness doesn’t help her argument with the older policeman, who either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to.

’And anyway, I was doxed, last week.’ His blank expression made me add, ‘A fan of Callum’s released my personal details. On the net. My address and stuff …’

His reaction is the final straw, and Bronte realises it’s not safe for her to stay where she is – too many people know her face, and now know her address. She was probably lucky this time, it was just a drugging, but her final retort to the useless cop is everything:

‘Good job I wasn’t raped, eh? You probably wouldn’t believe that, either.’

Her solution is another online option, the volunteering site HelpX, and a job on a remote property where she can lie low and wait for the next outrage train and a new victim to take the focus away from her.

Which is how she ends up at Bathurst station, where she is collected by Veda and taken to Gwendolynne. Veda, her husband Troy and their assistant Prish run a wellness retreat in the family home. Veda’s elderly mother Nell also lives there.

According to the website … bedrooms were ‘spiritual birthing suites’. Youborn is your key to neuronatal recovery, it said. Youborn will return you to youriginal strength, youriginal wellbeing, youriginal freedom.

The family have been forced to take on Bronte after a social worker intervened when Nell was found wandering by Iris, their neighbour. There’s something in the way Veda is responding to her mother’s needs that should have warned Bronte, though – it doesn’t match at all with Gwendolynne’s motto: Back To You.

The difference is driven home in no uncertain terms when, on the road from the station, Veda is pulled over by the police. There are false numberplates on her LandCruiser, and she goes from wellness guru to sovereign citizen in a hot flash.

‘Legally, this is a personal conveyance, not a motor vehicle. And I’m a living human being who doesn’t recognise or consent to the laws of a corrupt, de facto government.’

As Bronte observes:

She looked quite cheerful. Not the least bit crazy.

Arriving at Gwendolynne, meeting Nell, trying to find a routine in the midst of what seems like a powder keg waiting for a very small spark, Bronte finds herself surrounded by A-grade crazy, complete with an ‘assembly’, quite a few people with a bizarre line in pseudo-legal babble and an elderly lady who is obviously starting to fail, but also has a secret she’s desperate to keep hidden. This is quite a challenge for a young woman with enough problems of her own, who begins to think it might be time to choose between the volatility online or what is melting down in front of her face.

The plot heads into a full-on sovereign citizen confrontation after a bit of a slow build-up, as Nell has an accidental fall, is taken to hospital, and Veda and Troy panic about the supposed takeover of the property by illegal government forces. The dialogue here is so realistically crazy and the pseudo legal-speak on the page evokes a very similar feeling to when it’s encountered in real life – a desperate urge to be anywhere else, which Bronte feels, too. Things aren’t helped by spending her nights in a secluded caravan on the property – amid clear signs somebody’s creeping about in the dark – and her days discovering hidden panic rooms and an arsenal of guns in the house.

As tensions boil over, and the pseudo-legal babble becomes more insistent, it inevitably, ends up in a siege situation, with Nell, Bronte and two local police, Pereira and Yates, held inside the house.

I knew instantly what that noise was. I’d heard it in a thousand movies, though I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing it now. Nell squeaked. Pereira turned. Yates was already edging backwards, hands raised, expression blank.

Framed in the bathroom doorway, a gun barrel was pointing straight at him.

Their only chance of survival turns out to be some combined cunning, and those panic rooms.

Just when you think it’s all calmed down, there’s a final twist that Iris and Bronte, a friendship now forming between the two women, also weren’t expecting.

Iris turned to me, hands on hips. ‘Wayne gave me a piece of paper. He said I was served.’

My jaw dropped. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Writ of public summons. Not a real one. Some garbage saying I’ve been working for an unlawful global elite system run by international banks and the Pope.’

It will make you wonder just what it takes to make a sovereign citizen stop and have a think about their choices in life, as the threat is back, considerably more insistent, and the women’s options get more and more limited.

As daft as the whole scenario sounds, the sovereign citizen movement is treated fairly in Panic. They aren’t made out to be just weird fools. It’s clearly shown to be a dangerous movement, populated by delusional and manipulated people with very twisted beliefs. Sadly, they can and do pose a threat, and it was sobering to think of those, the police in particular, who have to walk into the real-life versions of this fictional tale.

Catherine Jinks Panic Text Publishing 2025 PB 336pp $34.99

Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.

You can buy Panic from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Australian crime fiction, Australian women writers, Catherine | Jinks, conspiracy theories, online harassment, sovereign citizens