Touch by Rob Hawes

Sixteen year old Jesse is bullied at school, and in the absence any friends and only minimal parenting from his father he has become dependent on Sam, a boy who haunts his dreams. As the bullying worsens, Sam seems to become less a dream and more a reality.

This story definitely needs a violence warning! There are a couple of lengthy scenes of extreme brutality, torture and rape that certainly tend towards gratuitous. Is the violence justified? Well you would need to read it to answer that question, but in the end we are talking about fiction and the author has chosen to put it in.

The story is well written and explores in depth the fate of the bully as victim far more at the pyschological level than the physical.  Anyone who has been bullied will recognise the cycle of fear that prevents the bully helping themselves out of their hell.  Anyone who has been bullied will also recognise the desperate fantasies of revenge even if their own imaginations never took them quite this far!

Add to all this an exciting plot and a twisting confusion about who or what Sam really is and you have a cracking story, one that I was glad to have read, with some reservation about the violence.  maybe I'm just too soft!

Read it at the authorshaunt