This is genuinely one of the most disturbing books I've ever read, I found it deeply unsettling and incredibly well-written. It has a bit of kitchen sink drama about it and I kept feeling that Morrissey surely must have written a song inspired by it at some point. It's about a teenager named Timothy Gedge poisoning the lives of various families in a placid seaside town, revealing secrets that he has somehow managed to uncover. There's constantly a sense that something is deeply wrong with Timothy, who is creepy beyond words, but we never find out what it is. It seems like he has some sort of mental disorder, but no one treats it as such. Some characters think that he's been neglected by his family, or 'dropped on his head', or is just like that. One girl thinks he's possessed. What really drew me in was the way truth and lies become increasingly indistinguishable as the story goes on; at first it seems like Timothy is blackmailing people with the truth about them, which they attempt to deny, but then he invents what is proven to be a lie, but if effects people like the truth. There are so many layers of lying, denying, etc, that the very idea of an objective truth starts to crumble. I also loved the style the whole book was written in and the way the characters were portrayed was very vivid. I'm pretty sure this book has been largely forgotten (I had to ask the local library to dig it out of their storage), which is a shame, because it's a very strong work, which does the same sort of thing that the much-praised Ian McEwan was doing at the beginning of his career, only it's much stronger and subtler.
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