The Butcher Boy

Insanity as a literary device is a challenging thing to get right. This is a more literary take on it, trying to get into the mind of a very disturbed young man, who is living in a kind of juvenile fantasy that all his acquaintances have long grown out of. The prose is pretty, but the lyrical stylings and confused perspective really frustrated me as reader. I can see why people might enjoy it, but it is all just way to dense a literary styling for my own preference. It acted as a barrier to me engaging with the characters. I am just not a fan of flowery literary stylings...

It's not a badly written book, but I found it pretty tedious. A man in a pub told me I should read it, and I wish he hadn't.