I read this YA book in 2002 and 2003. Twenty-one years later, I revisited it to discover if the writing is as extraordinary as I remember. It’s still the only book I’ve read where the narrator has synaesthesia. Maybe this was the point at which I realised I have some degree of the same condition.
When Luke wakes from a coma after suffering from meningitis, he experiences things in a different way. Before, he was an ordinary teenage boy who was a good runner and not particularly creative. After, he has a limp and his senses are mixed up, inspiring him to write. There is also a creature living in his head, Dreeg, who encourages him to use his powers to manifest characters from his imagination and to heal his leg. When Luke has premonitions of his sister being in danger, fiction and reality start to blur.
The way in which the author writes about Luke’s sensory experience is amazing. Scents, colours, sounds, tastes, insects, mists, slime, a glorious and frightening cacophony. What’s interesting is how that is taken further with the powers he is given. Dreeg seems very real, a shapeshifting devil which tempts Luke with visions of success with sport and girls.
As you might expect from a teen book from the early 2000s, there are some attitudes and language that would not be in a similar book published today, due to rapidly changing sensitivities.
It’s a good and unusual read, which I won’t be revisiting now that I’ve read it three times.
Published by Hodder, 2002.