It’s the story of Sonny Gee, a six-year-old Gateshead urchin abandoned by his mother and taken in by his grandfather, Joe. Sonny is a bonny lad, with big, blue eyes and long, red curls, but is also a little animal. He fights, he steals, he won’t eat anything but crisps and his swearing would make a stand-up comedian blush.But there is a reason for all this. Deprived of an education, neglected by his drug-addicted mother and abused by his brutal de facto stepdad, Macca, there’s really no other way he could have turned out. What he needs is love and attention, and he finally gets it from his grandfather.Joe is an ex-miner, dour, taciturn and proud, his hands “knacked” from drilling at the coal face, reluctant at first even to give Sonny house-room.

The man and the boy row constantly yet share an essential similarity of character Love and understanding develop between them. Sonny blossoms and begins to turn into the nice, intelligent little animal that he would have been all along if left uncorrupted. Until the baleful influence of Macca makes itself felt again…It isn’t subtle But The Bonny Lad packs an emotional punch The story is told largely in dialogue (with. I feel, rather too phonetic a rendering of Gateshead dialect; at times you feel you’re reading Viz), with lots of confrontation and a feelgood ending. As a novel, it’s a little too schematic; but it would make a great film.Toby Litt’s view is altogether bleaker. Deadkidsongs is set in the 1970s and describes the exploits of four pubescent boys who call themselves “Gang”.

When one dies from meningitis, they swear revenge on the boy’s doddery grandparents, who fatally delayed calling the doctor. Thus begins a systematic campaign of persecution aimed at driving the “dinosaurs” into their graves They steal the old couple’s photograph album and burn it They empty their medicines down the toilet They kill their dog. Meanwhile, tensions build between the boys amid scenes of escalating violence as they contend for leadership of Gang.Deadkidsongs clearly owes something to Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. In both books, a military-style gang of boys wages war against adults. In both, they graduate from atrocities against animals to atrocities against humans. Litt’s work is much longer, more complex, more intricately plotted, but both books have the same cool style and the same hip heartlessness.Gang’s numerous small cruelties build up to a gruesome finale that would be rejected as too grotesquely bloodthirsty for Grand Guignol. There is an alternative ending that casts doubt on how much of the story we should believe – but by then the damage is done and the images of horror are lodged in the reader’s mind.The boys’ nastiness is under-motivated.