Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I hadn't heard of this novel before the story broke, but a quick jump to Amazon shows me a few things. One, the cover is disturbingly sensual... disturbing because it's a high school girl (or at least supposed to be). Two, the reader reviews are pretty much evenly divided between loving it (5 stars, with 11 votes) and hating it (1 star, with 10 votes) with another 24 votes that take up the 2-4 spots.

The review from Publisher's Weekly reads:

Disquieting in its timeliness, Hornburg's (Bongwater) second novel is a tale of violence among high school cliques and a gritty portrait of adolescent pluck amid morbid chaos. Narrator Crystal Methedrine Swanson is on the verge of graduating from Downers Grove High in Illinois. Chrissie, as her friends call her, has a lot to deal with on the home front: her father has left without a trace, her brother is addicted to heroin and her mother is dating an increasingly sinister new beau. Chrissie and her boy-crazy, sexpot best friend, Tracy, also worry about "the curse" of their high school: each year before graduation, somebody in the senior class dies in a bizarre way. One year a math whiz killed several people in the parking lot before turning the shotgun on himself; other graduations were marred by suicide, drowning and several drunk-driving accidents. After Chrissie beats up a jock who tried to rape her at a party, she becomes terrified that she will be the next statistic. The jock and his buddies pursue an escalating plot of revenge beginning with a vicious car chase. They also set fire to Chrissie's school locker and strew dead dogs on her lawn. Adding to the plot twists of this teenybopper drama is Chrissie's obsession with a 26-year-old mechanic--cum-race-car driver named Bobby. Tough, insensitive and super-cool, Bobby is the kind of character only a teenage girl could love. Hornburg's prose is rife with adolescent jokes and lingo, some of it hilarious and sharp. At other times the humor wears thin, especially because Chrissie's youthful wisecracking does not segue smoothly into passages of soul-searching introspection. Yet Chrissie's relentlessly vernacular teenage voice takes up residence in the reader's mind, establishing her vulnerability and demonstrating the courage she shows on her stressful road to maturity.

The news is that Bret Easton Ellis, author of AMERICAN PSYCHO, RULES OF ATTRACTION, etc, has just come on to write the screenplay adaptation of Michael Hornburg's book for Mangrove Entertainment.

It seems up his alley. The angst and the mere fact that Hornburg's novel is so divisive already... well, that seems like Ellis territory. I also get the distinct feeling that we're going to be seeing a shit-ton of off-beat high school girls movies rushed into production thanks to the success of JUNO. What do you folks think?