Lost Boys - James Miller

Lost Boys starts out like a Lord of the Flies examination of adolescent mindset and the dynamic between groups of middle-class boys who have come into contact with a darker side of the world and deep primitive impulses. It’s superbly compelling and sinister, establishing a slightly unsettling supernatural tone when the boys, many of them sons of foreign diplomats and high-profile international businessmen, start to disappear, lured away from their comfortable lives by a recurrent common dream of a young foreign boy.

An investigator soon identifies the connections between the disappearances but the conclusions and the scale of the problem are too disturbing to contemplate. Lost Boys then takes on a J.G. Ballard tone, examining and relating the destruction of the middle-class Western family values and a generation exposed to increasing levels of violence, terrorism and wars, not only in video-games and on television, but in the whole nature of the turbulent state of world affairs. These serious concerns are tied up in the most brilliant and suspenseful of intrigues, the supernatural elements only highlighting the underlying horror and absurdity of our relationship with Asian and Middle-East nations and the exploitation of their people and resources.

It’s topical certainly, but unfortunately, as the novel develops, the debts it owes to other works becomes more and more apparent. With the missing son, a fractured middle-class family, and a father with a guilty colonial secret threatening anonymous videos, it’s perhaps most reminiscent (if not actually derivative) of Michael Haneke’s 2005 film ‘Hidden’ (Caché). Well-written, Lost Boys is a fine and relevant read then, if not exactly as deeply original or as challenging as its all too obvious references.