This is an original and inventive novel from Joshua Kornreich.In a language all his own, a language driven by stuttering and repetition, Joshua Kornreich evokes and seduces the reader into a boyhood mythography where things are not what they always seem to be. At the center of this world stands Kornreich's boy, a hypersensitive kid whose eyes and ears are struggling to make sense of a world fissured by his parents' marital unrest and his own invisible place in that familial world. What Kornreich's boy-narrator is fascinated with most compulsively - the household dustbuster, the backyard tree, the bushes that separate one backyard from another, not to mention the mysterious brown residue that resides at the bottom of the deep end of the family's backyard pool - is also the source of his most startling revelations. A first novel unlike any other "The Boy Who Killed Caterpillers" is a book of lingual daring and domestic disturbance.