Every so often a book bursts on the scene and triggers irresistible questions: Who is the author? What made him a writer? Is the book autobiographical? Is it fantasy? This is the case with Sarah, J. T. LeRoy’s deft and imaginative first novel. Does it matter that he is 20 years old? That he grew up in rural West Virginia and later on the streets of San Francisco? That he started publishing at 16, under the pseudonym Terminator? It does. And yet it shouldn’t.

Sarah is a coming-of-age novel that reads like a perverse children’s tale — an Alice in Wonderland on acid — with the ironic twist that its hero longs to become a woman, not a man. It’s the tragicomic story of a 12-year-old boy — Snow White taken up by the Seven Dwarfs, except the Seven Dwarfs happen to be a bunch of truck-stop transvestites, working the lot behind the Doves Diner in West Virginia’s back country. Some of the whores, or ‘lot lizards,’ are female; one of them is the boy’s mother. She’s young, beautiful, blond and very, very messed up … starved for his mother’s attention, the boy, who is nicknamed Cherry Vanilla, aspires to supplant his mom and become the best lot lizard in the state. The Doves Diner is a fantastical place, as much a product of hard-core realism as comic fantasy.