Stuck in a small town, worried over by his single mother - the chain-smoking, bible-quoting Lily - and the 'neighbourly' Mrs Nagle, John Devine yearns for escape. When Jamey Corboy, a self-styled Rimbaudian boy wonder, arrives in town John's life suddenly seems to be full of possibility. But together their nose for trouble may be their undoing and, as John hides from the reality of his mother's ever-worsening health, he is soon faced with a terrible moral dilemma. Brilliantly evoking all the frustrations and pent-up energy of a small-town adolescence, it also gradually becomes the story of Lily herself, and the secrets of her past. Suffused with eerie imagery, black humour and hypnotic prose, ''John the Revelator'' is a novel to fall in love with.