Book review: Alice And The Fly by James Rice

Published by Hodder & Stoughton

Rice’s protagonist, teenager Gregory Hall, is beset by a debilitating arachnophobia and a crippling shyness which are never explicitly diagnosed.

Nicknamed ‘psycho’ at school, caught in the middle of his parents’ loveless marriage at home, he speaks scarcely a word throughout the book.

But through his diaries, which he is encouraged to write as therapy, we enter into his inner world and his own internal logic.

As his obsession with the eponymous Alice grows, the narrative builds from one boy’s delusions towards something altogether darker.

As befits his narrator, the writing is at times frustratingly simplistic, but in this debut, Rice captures his dislocation and the loneliness well.

It is a book about conformity, and how our desire to conform can blind us to the deeper needs of individuals.

The genre birthed by The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time shows little sign of abating.