John Wiswell's Reviews > Inspection

Damn! What a book. It got under my skin with the first chapter in a way no other novel has this year.

What we have here is a small school of boys raised in entire isolation from the rest of the world, who are kept under the strict reign of something between a cult and a social experiment. What exactly the boys are being subjected to, and what their unhinged father figure wants from them, is something we piece together. But the boys have never known a life other than the tenuous facade they're stuck inside, and so they're totally naive about how much danger they're in. Utterly fascinating, and with some great twists down the line. My favorite Malerman book yet.