-----The Every BoyA NovelDana Adam ShapiroHoughton Mifflin:...

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The Every Boy

A Novel

Dana Adam Shapiro

Houghton Mifflin: 224 pp., $19.95

Henry EVERY is the Every boy of this slender and somewhat daffy novel from Dana Adam Shapiro, the co-creator of “Murderball,” a documentary about quadriplegic rugby players. Despite his name, Henry isn’t like every 15-year-old coping with adolescence in the Boston suburbs of the 1980s: He’s a graphomaniac, having, since age 10, filled more than 2,600 sheets of graph paper -- what he calls his “ledger” -- with his convoluted musings. Henry has other tics, including an overweening attachment to a little stuffed cow named Moo and the discomfiting habit of listening to an album of canned applause called “Great Ovations.” And, as we learn on Page 1 of “The Every Boy,” he happens to be dead.

Yet Henry, whose fate is laid out by Shapiro in a string of flashbacks, is perhaps the most ho-hum specimen in the author’s brimming cabinet of curiosities. Each of Henry’s parents (separated at the time of Henry’s demise) is a real piece of work. The dotty Hannah is a smothering mom who runs off to Holland to grow tulips, and the aloof, gin-loving Harlan, described by his son as “pretty rich but cheap,” has an unusual passion for do-it-yourself: He installs a 12-foot circular jellyfish tank in the rapidly disintegrating Every home, inexplicably transforming it into a kind of oceanographic research center.

Meanwhile, Henry’s life isn’t exactly the stuff of “The Wonder Years.” His best friend (and crush), Jorden, engages in the occasional menage a trois, and his uppity nemesis, Nika, expires after polishing off a piece of apple pie laced with rat poison. Then there’s Benna, the mysteriously beautiful one-handed girl who infiltrates Henry’s heart, and his ledger: “She’s the marshmallow,” he swoons, “in a bag of charcoal.” The novel is something of a marshmallow too: compact yet unnaturally puffed up, sweet and gooey, and, as each twee scenario is topped by the next, prone to premature staleness. Ultimately, Henry yearns, for some reason, to become a paraplegic; by that point, the reader has lapsed into a vegetative state.

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The Great Inland Sea

A Novel

David Francis

MacAdam/Cage: 258 pp., $23

In David Francis’ stark, enigmatic novel “The Great Inland Sea,” a teenager named Day escapes the family farm in Riverina, a parched and unwelcoming corner of Australia on the banks of the Murrumbidgee. What ensues is a miniature saga that zigzags from Riverina to Maryland’s eastern shore to Los Angeles, Mexico and back again to Riverina, as Day -- who works as a horse groom -- journeys to piece together the fragments of his emotional life and tattered family history.

It’s 1947 when Day’s mother, Emily, dies under shady circumstances. We see his father, a taciturn Scot named Darwin, unceremoniously dump Emily’s body into a freshly dug hole. Darwin, it seems, is not the warmest of humans. Day tells us that one of his eyes is damaged, “the colour of a bloodshot potato,” and when Darwin talks -- a rare occurrence -- he’s prone to cryptic asides: “Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet, or a New Zealander.”

So who can blame Day when he runs off? He escorts a horse named Unusual to Maryland, where he works at a horse farm, rides during his off hours, takes in the weirdness of rich America and falls for Calliope Coates, a tomboyish aspiring jockey.

They’re an unlikely pair of dysfunctional young equestrians, able to handle their mounts but unequipped to jockey the headlong twists and turns of growing up, of sex, of basic communication. Callie (as Calliope is known) continually gives Day the slip, leaving him in the dust of his own bewilderment and beaten-down conjectures: Is Callie my soul mate or tormentor? Did Darwin murder my mother? And is Dickie del Mar -- a polo-playing Argentine playboy -- my actual father?

In the end, Day faces the agonizing realization that Darwin, the father who never wanted him, might just be the one person who deserves his love.

Despite Francis’ insistence on keeping the pace to a slow canter, “The Great Inland Sea” (the title refers to the fact that Riverina had once been the floor of an ancient ocean) turns out to be as unforgiving and seductive as Riverina itself.