Willy by Robert Dunbar

I'm currently reading a brand new book courtesy of being one of the jurists for the HWA's Stoker Award for best novel. This one is Willy by Robert Dunbar, published by Uninvited Books. A strange, dark novel set in a school, most of whose pupils are boarders and all of whom seem oddly damaged. Mind you, most of the staff seem oddly damaged too.

The writing is vaguely reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye, though it's not a pastiche or anything like that. It's a real-time journal kept by one of the damaged pupils, whose roommate is a charismatic but possibly doomed young teenager called Willy.

This took me a short while to get into, possibly because of the way it's written, but it's sucked me in now and, though nothing overtly horrifying has happened yet, there are enough premonitions that things are not going to turn out well...