Books that blow your socks off

On the train this morning I started to read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. This book has been sitting neglected on my shelf for a couple of years. I bought it in a newsagency when I had a long journey ahead of me and didn't know if I had enough reading matter to keep me occupied and it was the only thing in the shop which:

a) didn't have gold embossed letters 15 centimetres high to indicate it was an "airport novel"
and
b) that I'd heard of that I hadn't read that wasn't by Tim Winton (whose books I dislike for complicated reasons).

I think I read the first page and decided to go to sleep. And ever since then, knowing that it's about a Columbine-esque mass shooting, I haven't actually felt that I NEEDED to read this. And I thought the Booker judges were maybe going for sensation over substance again in giving the prize to this guy. But then, this morning, I almost missed my stop because IT'S FANTASTIC.

Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of Victorian books lately and dodgy SF but the prose just struck me like a pole axe. This is in the first paragraph: "Hard to tell if she quivered, or if moths and porchlight through the windows ruffled her skin like funeral satin a gale." I wasn't entirely sure what it meant but I was hooked. And it keeps going like that. It takes a few pages to work out that in small town Texas, the police are talking to Vernon because he's the only friend of the supposed killer and Vernon just seems to be a bundle of neuroses and problems wrapped up in a 15 year old body. Can't wair to see what happens next.