Creepers

I clenched and unclenched my fists, my heart was beating fast fast. I looked at my best friend and saw his freckles and characteristic grin riding high. If I could make the distance with anyone it was Jamie. I was glad he was here, I wouldn't have dared do this on my own.

I nodded. I think I gritted my teeth. 'Okay,' I hissed. 'Let's do it. All the way!'

This extraordinarily assured and powerfully written first novel is told in the first person by its anonymous 14-year-old hero for whom the acquisition of a best friend, Jamie, is so precious that his loss is almost catastrophic. As the class swot who prefers reading to football and who is last to be chosen for a team in Games, the hero's masculine identity cannot be challenged so long as he is a good Creeper, a member of an exclusive brotherhood with its heroic mythical history, its Code of conduct and its special terminology: Snared, Blind, Resies, Pursuit. For this, he needs Jamie. The climax of the book comes when the hero attempts a record Creep which involves traversing secretly and without being caught (Snared) the back gardens of twenty-five consecutive houses.

Gray's intense and subtle psychological portrait of a troubled teenager with its convincing school and suburban neighbourhood setting recalls Robert Cormier's We All Fall Down and Michael Cadnum's Breaking the Fall but it is less showy, less histrionic and above all less bleakly pessimistic. Put to the test, the world is not as brutal and stratified (cool Ruth is revealed to be a Creeper of legend as well as a potential friend) as the hero in his isolation had assumed. A most original and impressive debut.