The Glister

the long version

"According to Leonard, the fifteen-year-old narrator of this extraordinary novel, the decaying coastal community of Innertown is a contemporary hell, part industrial ruin, part Dante's inferno, where the poisoned woods and the derelict buildings are haunted by wild children, a strange, sickly fauna and the mysterious figure of the Moth Man, an itinerant ecologist who appears to be conducting a bizarre survey into local insect populations, but might just as easily be the Angel of the Lord." "Here, Leonard and his friends exist in a state of suspended terror. Every year or so, a boy from their school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence to the contrary, the authorities claim they are simply runaways." "The town policeman, Morrison, knows otherwise. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed. Though seriously compromised, he would still like to find out the killer's identity. The local children also want to know and, in their fear and frustration, they turn on Rivers, a sad fantasist and suspected paedophile living alone at the edge of the wasteland. Frightened and disgusted by this vicious attack, Leonard takes refuge in the poisoned ruins of the plant, where he renews his friendship with the Moth Man and exacts a shocking revenge on the policeman, before entering the mysterious Glister: possibly a disused chemical weapons facility, possibly a passage to another world."--Jacket.