Runnerland, by John Burns

There was nothing special about the day Peter’s father died. At least not to start with. The alarm went and Peter hit snooze, hoping to pick up a dream about skipping stones across the sea. He was just finding his way back over the border into dreamland when the alarm went again, music on the radio, so he knew he’d dozed through the news and sports. Peter reached over and slapped snooze a second time – and was tasting that first golden lick of sleep when the racket started back up, some lame Green Day power balad he’d pay five bucks never to hear again. Was it his imagination or was even the radio on his case? It felt like everyone was, lately.

Runnerland is the first novel from Canadian author John Burns, although he has co-authored a cookbook and written for magazines and newspapers. I was going to link to the official Runnerland blog, but I have a thing about websites that insist on blaring music at you, drowning out the Belle & Sebastian song playing on iTunes. So feel free to go look at runnerland.blog.com and if the music starts, jump down to the post called “a dreamo new year” and hit pause on the little media player embedded there. Took me a while to find it. Edit: the music has been stopped, so go visit the runnerland blog.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll tell you about the book. Runnerland is the story of a kid called Peter and starts with him being pulled from class to go to the principal’s office where he finds out his father has died. Following this, he finds an envelope in the back of his father’s desk drawer revealing a long hidden secret. This combination of events sees Peter flee his home and he ends up living on the streets and mixing with a mysterious group of homeless kids and an older boy known only as Deckman.

Peter is essentially on a search for meaning. A search for what makes a person who they are. As the story develops, Peter starts having what are probably easiest to describe as visions, or hallucinations. These become an increasingly central part of the story and see it drift slightly into something containing a sort of fantasy element. This took me a little getting used to, but I thought both the plot and Peter’s character were well developed and I found it a good read that I am happy to recommend.