For a journalist it's always about the story: sniff it out, chase it down, find the angles and hook the reader in. In Peter Murphy's case, this work is usually done on the pages of Hot Press magazine. His first novel, John the Revelator, sees the Wexford-based writer adapting his journalistic skills for use in the longer form.

John Devine's mother was a great storyteller, or at least John Devine thought she was. The story he most loved to hear was of the stormy night of his birth when, his mother told him, "the thunder was so loud she flinched when it struck" ... there were "strobes of lightning and slam- dancing winds and volleys of rain for hours".

This auspicious meteorological accompaniment to John Devine's birth meant that he was "christened after the beloved disciple, the brother of James the Great". Our Lord, Murphy's boy-narrator tells us, "had called them the sons of thunder". The biblical John wrote the Book of Revelation and Murphy quotes from it in the epigraph to his novel: "And I John saw things, and heard them". John the Revelator then is the retelling of the things that John Devine sees and hears as he grows up in a small Irish town. It could be any small town in any province but we're definitely in bildungsroman territory.

John Devine lives with his mother, Lily. She's the heroine in his life. Murphy portrays a touching mother-son relationship as, over the years, Lilly grows ill and John becomes the carer. The redoubtable Mrs Nagle is a neighbour of the nosey variety. Her help in the house, when John's mother is sick, initially borders on slightly irritating interference, but later veers towards psychopathic possessiveness. There's also a sturdy Guard Canavan, a collection of drunken ne'er do wells and Miss Ross, the sexually open teacher of every teenage boy's fantasies. Most significantly, however, there's John's best friend, the suave Jamey Corboy with his "Crombie coat ... black jeans ... army boots [and] floppy hair". He's revered by John, and the inevitable sidekick for many of the expected rites of passage.

But Murphy plays with the coming-of-age genre. Jamey eventually takes the rap for an act of vandalism carried out by John and is sent off to the nearby Balinbaggin Boys' Home as punishment. The absence of the best friend leaves John alone in his hometown rather than striking out on a walkabout-style journey of self discovery. It is in his native place that he will learn to make sense of his life and grow into adulthood. Murphy has referred to a type of "apostolic fiction" where the narrator sees, hears and reports events. This brings us back to the author's journalistic origins and the revelator of the book's title.

Murphy's stylistic inventiveness allows John to enhance his own reportage with articles from the local Ballo Valley Sentinel, letters written by Jamey Corboy while in the Balinbaggin Home and "stories", also penned by Jamey, which arrive unannounced into the main body of the text. These interspersions shift the narrative point of view, hook the reader and give a crafty pace to the unfolding story. Less effective for me were the italicised dream sequences that appear between the book's chapters. These dreams centre, for the most part, on the wanderings of a big old crow. While they emphasise the visionary seer in John Devine and add to the fantastical side of the work, I found it difficult to relate them to the main story -- that, of course, may well have been the author's intention!

Peter Murphy has acknowledged the influence of books such as Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy, the American gothic style of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and the dirty realism of writers like Raymond Carver on John the Revelator. He also cites Arthur Rimbaud as one of the heroes of his 20s and Rimbaud's famous "Merde a Dieu!" graffiti is woven into the Revelator narrative. But in his first novel Murphy has absorbed and moved on from his influences and pushed form to exciting potentialities. His journalistic talents are the slaves rather than the masters of his inventive writing in the longer form. He shows he has the persistence to sniff out and chase down a story long enough to fill a 250-page novel, the creative flair to find a variety of angles from which to view his subject and the writerly craft to hook the reader from start to finish. He has set a high bar for his second novel to reach.

- Sean Rocks