I read this book on my last trip and it´s terrifying to know that this is the truth

THE MODUS OPERANDI OF Andrew Hutchinson's charmless mob in Rohypnol is simple: they roam nightclubs and upon seeing a suitable target, spike her drink, lure her back to their houses and (pack) rape the semi-conscious girl before dumping her. If anyone tries to separate them from their prey, a judicious spot of violence usually does the trick.

The title refers to the notorious date-rape drug that sedates its victims, leaving them as floppy as rag dolls, disoriented and vulnerable to all sorts of mischief, including, but not only, sexploitation.

Hutchinson's debut novel, which won last year's Victorian Premier's award for an unpublished manuscript by an emerging writer, owes quite a bit to A Clockwork Orange.

Once again, male delinquency and criminality stomp all over the pages of Rohypnol, leaving bloody smears and bodily fluids behind. Like Alex and his "droogs", Hutchinson's gang occupies an ugly amoral landscape dotted with sex and violence. With sneering contempt for authority and confident of their invincibility, these antisocial elements terrorise their local neighbourhood in their hunt for alluring but unwilling flesh.

However, similarities aside, there is none of Anthony Burgess' inventive language and flights of lyricism. Hutchinson's prose doesn't offer any embellishment; it's artless, deliberately flat and laced with obscenities, with sentences as short and sharp as a punch. ("I've seen and done things you'd be afraid to even think about. I've watched it happen and done nothing to stop it. And I don't feel one bit bad about it.") There's no subtlety and certainly no beauty.

The unnamed narrator, already a rebellious misfit who was expelled from his previous school, inadvertently but willingly becomes enlisted in the escapades. He joins leader Thorley, the brains behind the outfit, Troy the steroid-pumped musclehead, Harris the moneybags and Uncle the drug dealer.

Just in case we can't quite grasp the group's base motivations, Hutchinson helpfully and self-consciously italicises their manifesto throughout the book. Hoodlums by any other name, they are apparently part of "the New Punk", a collective of sorts that believes in self-gratification first and foremost: "No restrictions. No rule book ... (it's about) taking control. Seeing what you want and taking it, no matter the cost." Aside from smug, fervent individualism, their philosophy also advocates revenge: "If someone breaks your pencil, you break his fingers ... The New Punk is not about remorse."