Sam Mills's top 10 books about the darker side of adolescence. For my money it begins and ends with #1:

1. Lord of The Flies by William Golding
Lord Of the Flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today. It centres on a group of boys who, following a plane crash, are stranded on a desert island. At first they work together, building shelters and gathering food. But soon group tensions split the group as Ralph tries to maintain reason, order and structured discipline, opposed by Jack and his band of painted savages. Primal instincts take over and civilisation crumbles into animal savagery and violence. Golding uses the playing field of adolescence to explore the roots of evil, tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral of the story is that the backbone of a society depends on the ethical nature of the individuals who founded it, and not any government, or politics.

That may be a moral of the book, I guess, but the more important moral is pretty plainly that human beings are essentially savages and that any higher ideals we profess to believe in (including, especially, our "ethical natures") are predicated on the comfort and convenience of our fragile modern society.

#6, The Catcher in the Rye, is also a classic, of course. I haven't read either book since I was in high school. I'm somewhat afraid to revisit books I liked back then for fear I'll hate them now.