[The Wanderers] could be the flip side of American Graffiti: The time is the early Sixties, the kids are high-school age, the music is the Four Seasons, Dion, Smokey Robinson—but there the similarities end. These kids live in housing projects in the Bronx, run in gangs, rumble with car aerials and straight razors, and in general lead lives sufficiently grim to make the small-town pranks and repressed sexuality of the American Graffiti crew look like material for Hans Christian Andersen. Price's book chronicles the adventures and depredations of one gang, the Wanderers, during their last year of high school—an amalgam of sex, violence and humor, glued together with superb dialogue and unsentimental sensitivity….

While the book is clearly episodic, and many of the chapters could easily stand on their own as short stories, Price nonetheless manages to blend his humor and horror to create a sense...