Well-written novel light on plot

   I was born in a storm. My mother said the thunder was so loud she flinched when it struck, strobes of lightning and slam-dancing winds and volleys of rain for hours until it blew itself out and sloped off like a spent beast. ...
  My name is John Devine. I was christened after the beloved disciple, the brother of James the Great. Our Lord called them the sons of thunder.
  “John was Jesus’ favourite,” my mother told me.
  John Devine, an only child, lives with his single mother in an Ireland town, where the neighbors can be nosy but most look out for their own. He's close to his mother, a chain-smoking Bible thumper whose health is failing. She keeps her illness to herself, but her son knows something isn't right.
  John’s life is a bit lonely, with his mother as his main support, until he meets Jamey Corboy, a boy of questionable repute. The boys strike up a fast friendship, with Jamey rescuing John from his isolation. But when the pair begin getting into trouble, their friendship will be put to the test.
  “John the Revelator” by Peter Murphy is a coming-of-age tale centering around an interesting main character — though a bit underdeveloped — who is fascinated by worms and is haunted by dreams of crows.
  The prose is dark and descriptive but the plot is a huge flaw of this novel. There just isn’t much of one. The story is fairly predictable. There are no surprises. It’s just the story of a boy who grows up. There isn’t a whole lot of depth. That said, the writing alone makes this short book worth reading. Murphy does have a way with description, turning most settings into striking visuals.
  I walked home across the meadows, cutting through a three-cornered field with an old fairy fort in the middle, a stand of evergreens encircled by a wall built from quarry stones. The grass there was long and yellowed. I was exhausted by the day’s toil, so I lay down to rest in the shade of the fort. I gazed at the reddening sky, and after a while I could scarcely tell if I was lying flat on the face of the earth or hanging from its underside, magnetised by gravity. I closed my eyes, but the skin of my eyelids didn’t so much blot out the twilight sun as merely dim its intensity. My mind wandered, drugged with heat and fatigue, imagining the world as a stone skimming across the surface of space, sending ripples outward across the universe. Or maybe it was a ball bobbing in the vast blueness. A mote of dust floating across the pollen-strewn heavens.
  “John the Revelator” may lack development and complexity as far as characters and plot, but the book will hold value for readers who appreciate descriptive writing.