Winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for fiction in 1992, and shortlisted for the Booker, Patrick McCabe's compelling novel offers the reader Francie Brady in his own words, only child of an alcoholic father and a suicidally insane mother. Little more than the other person that dwells in the family home, Francie lives out his rejection through cinema, television, comics, and his only friend, the relatively normal Joe Purcell, investigating frozen puddles or praying to the Manitou.

McCabe tells his story in a tightly controlled flashback from Francie's wooded hide-out where we learn the whole town is after him "on account of what I done to Mrs Nugent," mother of Philip, the boy whom Francie sees as having stolen Joe away with his small town manners and money. It is an obvious technique, even though here it is more a matter of uncovering the reasons that lurk behind the action than the nature of the violent act itself.

The ingenuity of the (thankfully brief) book is in McCabe's probing the mind of the homicidal Francie to discover not simply horror but a mixture of cherishable black humour and outright pathos as well. It is invoked in a deliberately mannered and 'difficult' way, the book steering dangerously close to what might be uncharitably deemed 'experimental' - aside from full-stops there is little or no punctuation, even down to the level of dialogue being absorbed in to the main flow of the text. Initially off-putting, it marshals surprising strength, not least in its ability to proffer a seemingly authentic 'Irish' voice to the novel, and one that offers up its period detail - the 1960s - through a handful of guarded, almost oblique nuggets.

For the most part, The Butcher Boy summons the spirit of those other great novels powered by narrators sailing close to the line of sanity, Iain Bank's The Wasp Factory and Patrick McGrath's Spider, but is ultimately inferior to both in its being all too ready to jump in at the deep end from the word off where Banks and McGrath introduce dementia gradually in a drip-feed to beguile the reader before slapping them down. The beauty though of McCabe's book is in inviting us inside the head of a psychopath and even finding in there a genuine sadness as he is rejected by the towns people and remains sincerely bewildered by his unsuccessful attempts to recapture the easy simplicity of his friendship with Joe, who has grown up while Francie, for all his leaving school and landing a job in the local abattoir, still essentially remains adolescent at heart. Francie is ultimately an uncomprehending child trapped in a fast moving world who finally takes to lashing out at those he sees as responsible for essential loneliness.

If the book's experimentalism and singularity of tone mean it is subordinate to the wilful nastiness of Banks or the shifting perspective of McGrath, then it is testament more to the crushing strength of those novels rather than any innate flaw in McCabe's, and where it is more successful is in producing a believable moral ambiguity that marks it out as a remarkably challenging and rewarding read.