While Hutchinson’s decision to approach the unsavoury subject of date rape from the perpetrator’s perspective is commendable, his writing lacks nuance. Writing in the first person, he opts for short sentences and limited descriptors to establish a raw, almost conversational tone. At times, the combination of deadpan prose and excessive profanity borders on caricature, particularly in the narrator’s diary entries, which appear intermittently throughout the novel. Such entries are replete with tiresome ruminations on ‘The New Punk’: ‘We live in a road-rage society. And you are alone. You are not part of a team. We are not in this together’, along with nebulous self-reflection: ‘My life will not be about career prospects, wife and kids. Sucking the boss’s cock to get ahead. Politics. Religion. Corporate ladder.’ Far from granting insight into the narrator’s pathology, these passages indicate that he is suffering merely from a bout of teen angst and a severe lack of eloquence.

Hutchinson fares better with dialogue. He has a sharp ear for adolescent male vernacular, capturing the curious dynamics of the ‘rape squad’ through their succinct exchanges. In relaying the group’s rape expeditions, however, Hutchinson is at his best; indeed, there are echoes of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) in the unflinching depiction of masculine aggression. But while Palahniuk’s novel married violence with social commentary, the violence in Rohypnol does not serve any higher purpose. Combined with the one-dimensional sketches of adult characters, the employment of shock for shock’s sake undermines the novel’s potential for more pointed social critique.