*Starred Review* What fresh hell can this be? author Dorothy Parker once acidly asked. Fourteen-year-old Colin has the answer: his life. Blaming himself for his father's death, the boy is obsessed with self-hatred and the desire to be punished. Reading his late father's cryptic, enigmatic journals, he fittingly comes across a tantalizing entry called Things I've Learned in Hell. Unfortunately, his unhappy life teaches him its own bleak lessons: he fellates the boy he loves (yes, he's gay) and is then cruelly abandoned; his family crumbles; he begins a tentative relationship with a predatory teacher; and the soul-killing inventory goes on. Meanwhile, his mother is living her own hell: suicidal, she carries her late husband's gun and a cache of bullets in her purse; has an ill-advised affair; and falls in hopeless love with her therapist. Finally, fleeing the quotidian awfulness of their respective lives, mother and son travel to Los Angeles, where instead of healing, they find only the Apocalypse. If all this sounds melodramatic, in Nathan's skillful, beautifully written telling, it isn't. He selects his incidents artfully and in part by shifting the point of view between Colin and his mother does a masterful job of creating believable, multidimensional characters about whom the reader cares desperately. And if their ending is heartbreaking, it is artistically inevitable. Nathan's first novel is beautifully done and promises to linger in the reader's memory.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2017 Booklist