[In the following review, von Mueller praises McCabe's The Butcher Boy as “an absolute masterpiece.”]

Imagine a world seen through the eyes of a little boy lost in the kaleidoscopic maze of fear and grief. Imagine a world where small-town sensibilities and pop-culture flotsam collide with childish fancy and lethal rage. Such is the world of The Butcher Boy.

Patrick McCabe's newest novel created quite a stir when it appeared across the water. The Butcher Boy won kudos and wowed critics throughout England and Ireland, garnering the 1992 Irish Times' Aer Lingus Prize. Now, thanks to Fromm International, American audiences can experience one of the most chilling reads to emerge in a long, long time.

Francie Brady lives in a small Irish town, the son of an alcoholic trumpeter and his manic wife. His story, told in first-person narrative, is one of numbing horror and wrenching sadness.

Unable to come to grips with the erosion of his parents and bewildered by the chaotic boundary between fantasy and an all-too-grim reality, Francie retreats ever further into himself. The arrival of a new family, the Nugents, to his staid community sets in motion the machine of Francie's madness. The Nugents come to represent all that frays the fragile fabric of his world. Change becomes conspiracy, loss becomes assault, and Francie quickly becomes his neighbor's worst nightmare. And ours.

Francie's mother suffers a mental breakdown and is sent to a “garage”; it is the first of what the troubled boy comes to see as deliberate abandonments. Her eventual suicide, his father's decaying mental and physical health, and his estrangement from his only pal Joe, who he is convinced has been seduced by the diabolical Nugents, leave Francie stranded in his own bleak hell.

His increasingly erratic and sometimes violent behavior lands Francie in a Catholic reform school. There, Francie's vivid and possibly psychotic imagination begins to conjure up visions from his personalized apocalypse. Among monolithic icons and pederastic priests, Francie finds himself in the company of saints, angels, and even of Mary herself:

She had some voice, that Blessed Virgin Mary. You could listen to it all night. It was like all the softest women in the world mixed up in a huge big baking bowl and there you have Our Lady at the end of it.

She had a rosary entwined around her pearly white hands and she said it gladdened her that I had chosen to be good.

I said no problem, Our Lady.

Advised by the Blessed Virgin Mary and her cohorts to keep his nose clean, Francie is eventually allowed to return to society. He takes a job as an apprentice at the local butcher, and becomes a sort of small-town oddity, an eccentric victimized by his mother's insanity and his father's alcoholism and failure.

The Butcher Boy reads like an autobiography of Norman Bates written in the hand of James Joyce. McCabe's fluid prose is by turns poignant, comical, and shocking. It is seldom that we see madmen from within, and I cannot recall ever seeing one so clearly.

So totally enrapt do we become in the experience of Francie Brady that we quickly lose perspective on his behavior. His actions, violent though they may be, are only revealed through the darkling glass of the perpetrator's carnival mind. Francie can be as charming as he is violent. He is depraved and a criminal, and yet his story is more tragic than horrific, for we suffer his torments with him. We are gnawed by his fears, thrilled by his visions, and share his desperate yearning for some salvation.

The book reaches its shattering climax as the town and the world teeter breathlessly on the brink of Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis. By the time he confronts the dreaded Mrs. Nugent, Francie is numb to his revenge. Horribly, so are we.

The Butcher Boy is an exquisitely rendered portrait of a mind overthrown. At once a black comedy, a coming-of-age tale, and a gripping novel of suspense, McCabe's American debut is an absolute masterpiece. As disturbing as the book can be, McCabe's virtuoso prose makes irresistible this invitation to join a madman in the prison of his own mind.