"The Crossroads" by Niccolò Ammaniti

An audio book.

Cristiano (13) is woken by his drunk 37 y.o. father Reno Zena. The neighbour's dog is barking. His father gives Cristiano a gun and tells him to kill it - Reno doesn't like the owner Castordan anyway.

Quattro Formaggio, a bit slow, has assembled a giant nativity scene from found parts. Reno had protected Quattro Formaggi ("the idiot") from when they were in the chidren's home.

Teresa has left Dannilo because he's an alcoholic and he was responsible for their daughter's death. Danillo's planning a bankraid, crashing through the wall with a tractor. He works with Reno and Quattro Formaggio.

Christiano likes (and is teased by) 2 girls at school - Esmiralda and Fabiana. He sees them shop-lift. The girls fancy Tekkon. Christiano slashes his motorbike tyres. Tekkon and his mates attack him, and threaten him for 1000 euro. Cristiano's dad, thinking the attack unprovoked, makes Cristiano attack Tekkon with a bat. Quattro Formaggio fancies one of the girls as well - she reminds him of a porno favourite.

Reno wants to keep Cristiano, so he's careful to keep their social worker Beppe happy. Beppe's starting to go out with Ida, his best friends wife. They have sex in a campervan. The roof blows off. Ida wants to live with him. Later, Beppe runs over a foreigner while driving. He's not dead after all.

A thunderstorm messes up people's plans in several of the stories. Reno changes his mind about the bank raid. Fabiana is accosted on a remote road by Quattro Formaggio, who mixes up porn with reality. Quattro kills her, calls Reno for help, then accidentally wounds Reno and leaves. Reno calls Cristiano for help. Cristiano finds Fabiana dead and his father, dying and takes him home and he's rushed to hospital. He survives. Cristiano deals with the corpse.

Dannilo hears that Teresa is pregnant and that a faulty child-seat was responsible for his daughter's death. He wants to buy a painting of a crying clown. He tries to do the bank raid alone. He's not driven for years. He dies at the wheel, speeding into the wall.

Beppe offers to stay for a week with Cristiano so he needn't go into care. He had plea-bargained with God, promising to break with Ida if the foreigner wasn't dead. Quattro Formaggio seeks God's help to save the life of Reno, then decides he should kill him instead. He starts calling himself "Carrion Man".

In the end, there's a service for Fabiano. Her father can't understand how God could let it happen. Cristiano know his father, bad though he is, couldn't have killed the girl. Quattro Formaggio kills himself.

Other reviews

• Ian Thompson (Ammaniti's allusions to 1970s film and B-movie schlock place him at the vanguard of Italy's so-called giovani cannibali - young cannibals)
• Toby Litt (The novel's title in Italian was Come dio comanda ... sections and chapters are a page or half a page long. Almost every scene contains a twist - and, because of this, the reader soon starts second-guessing the action. If a scene begins with a character fearing impotence, it will end with them sexually triumphant. If a character seems to have died, they will be resurrected. Also, every scene has an explicit point. The characters are shunted around with no regard for plausibility. ... this isn't a realist novel at all, but an Italian version of Deep Southern Gothic - complete with white supremacist father, idiot rapist sidekick, loser alcoholic sidekick and - at the centre of it all - a traumatised but virtuous child)