PRISING BOYS AWAY from the lure of technology and getting them to read is hard work, as any parent knows. The three thrillers I recommend this week should grip those of 12+ who have raced through Anthony Horowitz or Darren Shan and who crave more gore. Each is about a disaffected teenager who must survive a nightmare situation from which there seems to be no escape. No, not school: it’s normal life with a bit of magic, or technology, thrown in.

Frances Hardinge’s debut, Fly By Night was a brilliant yet maddeningly ornate historical fantasy about a runaway girl and her goose. Verdigris Deep is utterly different, and more impressive. Three modern teenagers, Ryan, Josh and Chelle, are stranded one evening until Josh climbs down a well and steals some coins for their bus fare. But the well is haunted by a witch: soon Ryan is growing eyes in his hands, Josh makes lights explode and Chelle babbles other people’s thoughts.

The well witch is fed up with having to deal with people’s wishes, and the kids realise that, to be free of her, they have to grant the wishes made by those who threw in the coins. It’s the kind of problem that E. Nesbit might have come up with, and the teenagers’ ingenuity and ebullience at providing, say, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or a romantic partner make the story rattle along.

Each is cursed with powers peculiar to his or her own nature. Ryan, the most sensitive and thoughtful, discovers there is a secret wish in dare-devil Josh’s heart that is far more dangerous than, say, the yearning for a Harley or for romantic love; but how to save him without killing him is not so easily known.

Hardinge writes with energy and verve, and her grasp of the gulf between teenagers and adults is assured. However, most teenage boys are more likely to be drawn to two thrillers that draw on science fiction to dramatise feelings of anger and alienation. Kevin Brooks’s Being is about the orphaned Robert, who comes out of anaesthesia to find something gruesome inside his “bad belly”. Before he knows it, Robert is running for his life, assisted only by Eddi, a cool former girlfriend of a friend.

This is very similar to the premise of the popular Jimmy Coates series for slightly younger readers, but Being holds it own – even if it does end annoyingly on a cliffhanger. Who, or what, is the orphaned Robert? Android, cyborg, X-Man or freak, he can heal himself and fight back but he cannot protect Eddi once the body count rises. Shortlisted for the Carne-gie Medal, Brooks is violently enjoyable, and worth catching.

David Thorpe’s Hybrids takes the cyborg idea even further, with a stunningly clever novel that won a nation-wide competition run by its publisher, HarperCollins, and Saga magazine. Teenagers infected with “Creep” become, literally, welded to technology. Johnny Online and Kestrella are both Hybrids, but where Kestrella has an outdated mobile merged with one of her hands, poor Johnny has an entire screen for his face. Able to communicate only through speakers and a screen image, he has put out a Declaration of the Rights of Hybrids that has drawn Kestrella, desperate for news about her infected mother, to make contact.

A dystopian version of Blairite Britain is drawn with economy and wit. Rounded up by the Gene Police and sent to the mysterious Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation, the teenagers experience menace and squalor; Britain is sent into quarantine by other countries. Johnny’s cynical, off-beat narrative voice, and Kestrella’s hopeful, tender naivety are both well done. Although it has a disappointing climax, Hybrids will get boys (and girls) talking and thinking about a brave new world without technological stimuli.

Verdigris Deep Macmillan, £10.99; 400pp £9.89 (free p&p)

Being Puffin, £9.99; 336pp £9.49 (free p&p)

Hybrids HarperCollins, £5.99 ; 304pp £5.69 (free p&p)

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