Perhaps the most disturbing thing about it is that the characters and their actions - which are sometimes truly reprehensible - are almost all based on real life events.

The Bluffs, a ripping crime thriller set in the Great Western Tiers, is fiction.

But it draws heavily on what Perry has seen or heard in his career as a counsellor, working in high schools and men's rehabilitation facilities.

"My clients have such dark lives, and dark worlds," he said.

"There are elements of real people in [the book], and as a case worker and a youth worker, I really was taking people's stories and weaving them together into characters."

The Bluffs follows the residents of a small town as they try to figure out what happened when four teenage girls go missing in the mountains.

It's a great read, especially for crime fiction junkies.

But it may be a little unsettling for parents of teenage girls, if you have managed to put out of your mind just how intense and troubling that time in life can be.

Perry's job working as a counsellor in high schools gave him access to some pretty disturbing behaviour - and without going into too much detail for the sake of spoilers, suffice to say the novel doesn't hold back from the funhouse-mirror madness of adolescence.

"Teenage girls - especially when they've experienced significant trauma, and especially when they haven't been supported from a young age - are scary," he said.

"I didn't want to shy away from that."

One character is a social media star, and Perry said one reader told him he thought the character's subscriber count was totally unrealistic.

That is, until the reader spoke to his teenage daughter about the YouTube world.

"The truth can be stranger than fiction for older readers, when it comes to that kind of stuff," Perry said.

Another criticism was that some of the girls were sexually active.

"I'm like, 'Have you worked with teenage girls?'" he said.

"Because I work in high schools."

Along with the stories he's heard at work, another inspiration was a real-life Russian internet game called the 'Blue Whale Challenge'.

Reports of the Blue Whale Challenge said it involved an administrator sending an invite to the game to someone else, usually a vulnerable person that had been specially targeted.

The game would incite the person to complete 50 dares in 50 days that rapidly escalated in severity, ultimately requiring the participant to do some truly blood-chilling stuff.

A 21-year-old psychology student with an obsession with the occult was arrested for creating the game, and two arrests of copycats have also been made in Russia. A number of real-life deaths have been linked to the challenge.

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Another online inspiration for Perry was the 'Momo Challenge'. It was reported that this game involved internet trolls editing kid-friendly videos on YouTube like Peppa Pig or Fortnite, and adding a creepy face with bulging eyes, long black hair, and a gaping smile into the middle of them. 'Momo' would then tell the children watching to hurt themselves.

In both cases, the authenticity of these online games have been questioned, and it's been suggested they could have hoaxes aimed at creating a moral panic.

But they still had a disquieting effect on the cultural psyche.

And what about one of Perry's characters in the book, a steroid-addicted, predatory school teacher - was he inspired by real events?

"That was inspired by stories that I've heard from students - alleged accounts, and also older friends about teachers that were quite predatory to them ... and got away with it, in the end," he said. "It is pretty dark."

"I also wanted to draw attention to steroid abuse, because that's really widespread in males. One side effect of steroid abuse is an increase in libido, and men who take steroids make decisions that they wouldn't make."

As a counsellor who is also an author, Perry is in a unique position when it comes to being able to probe the depths of another person's inner world.

He said it's a responsibility that he doesn't take lightly.

"It's a privilege and an honour that they let me into their world - because a lot of this demographic don't trust very easily," he said.

"But they let me in ... I hear a torture story every Tuesday. You know? I head the worst of humanity, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, having the wrong parents.

"But I also learn about resilience, and those hidden depths. There can be glittering moments in that underworld."

His clients know that he's writing a book, and he said they know their input is valued.

"When we've finished the counselling session and we're on break, I'll say, 'Alright - I need some ideas on how to launder money'," he laughed. "And they'll go, 'Well, this is what my mate did, this is what I got caught for doing'."

The Bluffs is plot-driven but rolls out a cast of intriguing small-town characters.

Each player has their own secrets, hidden connections, and tantalisingly-revealed true motivations.

One is the town's friendly neighbourhood weed dealer.

"He's based on a particularly client I had, who was a drug dealer - and he's a really good bloke," he said. "A lot of drug dealers are."

"He commented once, 'Everyone in the news tells me I'm a piece of s**t, so that's how I act. If people gave me a chance, I wouldn't be like this'.

"And I found that so heartbreaking, and that's where the idea of the character came from."

The Bluffs has a cop still reeling from his traumatic last case, a corrupt local sergeant, and a timid teacher overcome by guilt.

The setting itself also plays a major role.

Perry splits his time between Burnie and Hobart, but spent a lot of time as a child in the Great Western Tiers with his family.

His mother grew up in the small community of Western Creek, which is fictionalised - with a lot of liberties taken - in the town of Limestone Creek in the book.

Perry's grandfather was part of the local search-and-rescue team, and would regale his grandchildren with fascinating stories about the sinister and highly-changeable dolerite escarpments.

The pull of the Tiers invaded Perry's psyche, with its eerie, misty forests and abundance of hidden crags.

A local legend says that 19^th century cannibal convict Alexander Pearce hid out from the law in a cave in the Tiers, and that his descendants could still haunt the mountains and its scattering of settlements.

The novel also touches on the region's Aboriginal history, and Perry said he consulted local figures to make sure he reported it accurately through the words of the characters.

Perry has deftly drawn vivid sketches of the cast that populates his fictional town.

They speak in punchy, believable dialogue that he said often came directly from real conversations with clients.

But character development, and descriptions of the physical world, are subservient to the plot.

The narrative races along pulling the reader from page to page, with a freight-train momentum that starts with the first word and ends with the final full stop.

As a 28-year-old with an impressive new book out, Perry is likely to be seen as a bit of a wunderkind: as if the urge simply took him one day and he sat down to pump out a novel, immediately ready to be presented to the reading public.

But the truth is, The Bluffs is the 11th manuscript he has attempted to sell - and his first success.

"Originally I was writing young adult novels," he said.

"I started writing at about 15, and I was writing was I was reading, which was young adult fantasy.

"I've always had a real passion and goal to be a writer - I've just always wanted to be a writer.

"I've tried to get every one of [the previous attempts] published and didn't get anywhere, lots of pushback, lots of rejection."

At this point, he had some money saved up.

He decided to hire a freelance editor - who is now his agent - to give him a bit of advice on what his work was missing.

It was the freelance editor who suggested Perry try his hand at a different genre.

So, with hit novels The Dry by Jane Harper and Scrublands by Chris Hammer in mind, Perry sat down to write an evocative Australian crime thriller, for a more mature, adult audience this time.

"One thing my editor told me was to trust the reader," he said.

"You know, he would go in, and he would say, 'You've already said this, you're repeating this - you can trust the reader to connect these dots.

"And that's different to young adult, because you're working with less advanced readers so you've got to spell things out."

That being said, with its high school setting and realistic characters, it's easy to see The Bluffs becoming popular with older teenagers, who see themselves and their peers in the dramatic and complex protagonists: Madison, Cierra, Georgia, and Jasmine.

He also learned to be ruthless with the direction of his work.

"For me, every sentence and paragraph I'm writing - if I'm bored, I get rid of it, and I write something else," he said.

"Every line, every paragraph, every chapter I'm reviewing to make sure it's interesting - to make sure it's not boring and that there is rhythm, and movement, and flow, and the right emotional beats. The moment there's not, I ditch it and go in a different direction.

"It does mean sometimes I do write 20, 30, 40 thousand words in the wrong direction - and then I'll go back to it and realise it doesn't feel right. Even if I can't figure out why - logically, story structure wise - if my gut's telling me it's not the right direction, I'll delete 40 pages and start again. That happens a lot.

"It's unfolding as I'm writing - so I'm finding things out as well. I didn't know who did it when I started writing, and I didn't know how it was going to end. And then when you finish it you can go back, and flesh it out, and make [the character's] reasons clear."

The Bluffs leaves the door open for a sequel, but his next book will be about something else entirely.

It's still a crime fiction novel set in Tasmania - this time in Eaglehawk Neck - but it will follow a group of suburban mothers who set up an ice-dealing syndicate, and an abducted girl who returns to the town and sets the series of events in motion.

"Everyone's a bit disappointed now; they're begging me for a sequel," he laughed.

"But to be honest, I had a two-book deal so I had to start writing book two from the moment I signed the contract, and I just didn't know if people were going to like The Bluffs enough to warrant a sequel."

Fortunately, the feedback he has received so far about his first published novel has been "overwhelmingly positive."

He said the most meaningful response was that friends who "haven't picked up a book since primary school" smashed through it in a matter of days.

But the five-star advanced reviews have been pretty nice, too.

"All those things that you dream of hearing as a writer ... you're never really sure if it will happen," he said.

"It's almost surreal."

The Bluffs will be available to buy from July 2 through Penguin Random House.