Kerosene
(1999)

Kerosene is about a chronically shy kid named Cal, who only finds relief from his crippling condition by setting things alight. But when he unwittingly crosses two girls at school, they embark on a plan of revenge that ultimately sends him spiralling into pyromania.

This book was just pure catharsis. I was having a bad few months of it one winter at University, and some days I was just walking around like Cal does in the book, unable to meet anyone's eye. A lot of people found these passages particularly well-observed, which is kind of them; but I think I had an advantage, as I was in the unpleasant position of feeling that way at the time I wrote them. Cal was just an extrapolation: what would it be like to feel like that all of the time?

As far as pyromania went, I'd gone through the phase of torching all my toys with lighter fluid and matches that I think most pre-pubescant boys experience at one time or another, which probably cost me thousands in melted Star Wars figures and one burned original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue #1 (the Eastman and Laird version, not the crappy TV series spin-offs). Also, I was living in customary student squalor at the time, in an enormous room with no double glazing or heater, and the coldest winter in living memory was going on outside. Fire was something that cropped up a lot in my thought processes when I woke up with my breath steaming the air of my bedroom.

But the real payoff was the final section of the book, set in a blazing school. That school was modelled on my secondary: all the corridors that the pupils run through follow the same floorplan, all the classrooms are the same, and so on. By the time I was writing Kerosene, I'd been learning stuff solidly for about fifteen years, primary through to University. And I was sick of being educated. If burning my toys was a rite of passage, then burning my school was one too.

A little while after Kerosene came out, someone tried to set fire to my school in real life. I hope that wasn't my fault. It was just a book, y'know?