Will Jody stop Robbie? Will readers overcome their roiling stomachs enough to care? While the grim circumstances of these kids’ lives are truly heartbreaking, there are darkly comic moments and even a glimmer of hope in the finale but these elements are weighed down by the book’s sheer amount of squalor, made all the more disturbing because the main characters are children.

Over the course of about a day, the conflicted Jody details past and present exploits with Robbie, who hits Jody and supplies the kids with street-drug-loaded drinks they call supermilk Midget, who talks only to bugs and Dag, who is her parents’ only shining hope after her sister was sent to a clinic after a suicide attempt. Lord of the Rings–obsessed Jody narrates with an exhaustingly scattershot and affected tough-kid lingo that calls to mind A Clockwork Orange, and he spares the reader nothing when it comes to bodily fluids or functions as well as an enduring preoccupation with his wiener. He gives Jody and Dag the job of stocking up on supplies. In middle school, Robbie was a football star and local hero, but multiple concussions and abuse at the hands of a coach have left him a wreck of a human being, one who plans to poison/maim/kill children with Halloween candy.

Robbie, who has “all this pussy ass black hair down his neck plus pimples all across his flab cheeks and the saddest little mustache you ever saw,” is a 30-something man who lives in a crumbling and cluttered house on the decidedly rough Yellow Street and counts young narrator Jody, Jody’s little foster sister, Midget, and Dagmar, a girl from the right side of the tracks, as his only friends. A troubled man plans to unleash his rage on trick-or-treaters with tainted candy, enlisting the help of three neighborhood children to carry out his plan.

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus