SOURCE: “Bloody Sunday in Hot Pants,” in Observer, May 24, 1998, p. 17.

In the following review, Lee discusses the horrifying world of Patrick Braden in McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto.

This is a horrible and pathetic story, told with irresistible zest, brio, and gaiety. That's what we've come to expect from Patrick McCabe, and Breakfast on Pluto is no disappointment. He is a dark genius of incongruity and the grotesque. Whether with the boy misfit-turned-crazed-murderer in The Butcher Boy, or the demented headmaster in The Dead School, McCabe's brilliant, startling talent is to make enchantingly dashing narratives out of the most ghastly states of mind imaginable, and to induce compassion for lives which seem least to invite it. In The Butcher Boy, violence boiled up through the narrator out of his griefs, traumas and losses. In Breakfast on Pluto, the violence and hatred seething inside the story-teller are in response to...