Before even reading a word of John the Revelator, it's hard not to admire Peter Murphy. Not just because of his savvy, literary approach to music writing (as a senior writer at Hot Press), but because of the sheer effort he put into birthing his debut novel.

Juggling a journalism career and raising three daughters, he rose at 5am every morning for several years, writing in three-hour chunks before the school run. "When I was 33, I started to feel this sense of dread that I would be writing about other people's work forever. I had this gnawing feeling of something that didn't exist. In this case, it was something I wanted to read, but no else is going to write that book unless you do. The more this went on, the more unpalatable the prospect of not finishing it became. It was me, or it, at the end."

Having two abortive novels under his belt, work on John the Revelator began almost five years ago. The impetus came when a character from an earlier book called Scalder (which "wasn't the book I wanted to write") mutated out of it. The wheels were further greased by the fact that Murphy joined a writing group with three friends. "We met every fortnight for two years and they homed in on sections involving John and his mother Lily, telling me that they were the core of the book." John the Revelator takes place in the fictional town of Kilcody, where John, a quiet boy obsessed with worms, lives with his religious, chain-smoking mother -- until a literary rebel called Jamey Corboy shows up.

With a backdrop of small-town secrecy and an array of characters (a witchy neighbour, an asylum seeker, a gangster), John's story is a modern Irish coming-of-age tale. It has been compared to Pat McCabe's charcoal narratives of rural life, but it also draws on the apocalyptic visions of Nick Cave and the imaginative psychology of Sheridan Le Fanu. "The Butcher Boy had a seismic effect on me", says Murphy, "but I only read about 2% of contemporary Irish writing -- I find it colourless and drab. I love exaggerated humour, tall tales, the insane and the imaginative -- which are missing from lots of Irish writing. I started with Stephen King at 13 and went on to John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner -- some of whom weren't afraid to explore the comical, the dark or the supernatural."

The book's biblical, end-of-the-world title is taken from the old blues song which contains the line: "Who's that a-writing?" "I fell in love with the book's title years ago", says Murphy. "It seemed mysterious and ancient and cutting edge, but, as I worked on it, out went the original shack-dwelling hermit idea and it became more of a story about family."

The relationship between Lily and John is brittle, but often touching, and Murphy says that this "iconic outline of a mother" has some parallels with his own mother. Lily regales John with stories throughout the book and I ask if he grew up in a house of storytellers. "My father was a yarn-spinner and a riddler but there's a bit of both of my parents in Lily. The softness comes from mother, the brusqueness from my father, but then stories are the steak and potatoes of everyday life. The whole countryside is spun out of yarns."

Murphy grew up in Enniscorthy (and moved back there last year) and as the book is about a young man growing up in a rural town, will readers draw comparisons with his own life? "Like John, I was quiet and fairly shy, and the 'watching' aspect of his character, the feeling of not participating, was me at 14 or 15." He also admits to the same kind of nocturnal countryside wandering that his nature-obsessed protagonist is fond of.

"Sure, I rambled the lanes. We weren't entertained as kids and you were usually left to your own devices. But it was a landscape that you could roam safely in, wandering around bogs and creepy old forests, poking around in cowpats with a stick, turning over rocks and peering at frogspawn." And it's these experiences that are vividly captured in the book. Murphy is a stylist and unashamedly literary, but the book is never verbose. At the dump, a duvet is "stained with shapes of countries that never existed", strawberry pickers move down the lines like "grubs working on a carcass".

As a music journalist, he deliberately steered clear of shortcuts to describe setting or time frame. "I didn't want to namecheck bands because I wanted the language itself to produce an atmosphere. I could have been more accurate about childhood, but I would have sacrificed something visceral. Moving back here, I realised that the imaginary version of the small town is very different. Modern Ireland as metropolitan is a media construct -- when you're outside of Dublin it's medieval."

John the Revelator is a stunning debut -- darkly comic and wonderfully evocative. Now Murphy is working on another book which he hopes "doesn't take as long". HQ

John the Revelator y is out now, published by Faber E12.99

- Sinead Gleeson