The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars

Fiction. In a language all his own, a language driven by stutterance and repetition, Joshua Kornreich evokes and seduces the reader into a boyhood mythography where things are not what they always seem to be. At the center of this world stands Kornreich's boy, a hypersensitive kid whose eyes and ears are struggling to make sense of a world fissured by his parents' marital unrest and his own invisible place in that familial world. What Kornreich's boy-narrator is fascinated with most compulsively--the household dustbuster, the backyard tree, the bushes that separate one backyard from another, not to mention the mysterious brown residue that resides at the bottom of the deep end of the family's backyard pool--is also the source of his most startling revelations. A first novel unlike any other, The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars is a book of lingual daring and domestic disturbance that belongs on the shelf next to Gordon Lish's Peru, not only for the singular way that it deals with the subject matter of childhood violence, but also for the sheer force and torque of its sentences.