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Overview
Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.
Synopsis
Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.
Publishers Weekly
In this "closely observed study of madness, memory and storytelling'' the delusional Dennis Clegg, aka Spider, returns to his London neighborhood after 20 years in a mental hospital and insists that his father, not he, murdered his mother. "An admixture of Poe and the comic vulnerabilities of Beckett, this tale lingers long and disturbingly in the mind,'' said PW.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In this "closely observed study of madness, memory and storytelling'' the delusional Dennis Clegg, aka Spider, returns to his London neighborhood after 20 years in a mental hospital and insists that his father, not he, murdered his mother. "An admixture of Poe and the comic vulnerabilities of Beckett, this tale lingers long and disturbingly in the mind,'' said PW.Library Journal
Spider Cleg moves into a London boarding house near the squalid East End neighborhood where he lived 20 years earlier. Here memories of his mother's murder and other childhood traumas arouse his latent schizophrenia. Spider tells his own story in the form of a secret journal, and hallucination sometimes displaces reliable narrative. Since events of the past and present unfold simultaneously, the book skillfully maintains two levels of suspense. We wonder what happened to Spider as a child and what this past suffering will lead him to do. As in many stories by Poe, McGrath's portrayal of a diseased mind evokes disquiet but also voyeuristic fascination.-- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville
Katherine Dunn
Brilliant...the sensuous world that McGrath creates is intense in its beauty...mesmerizing.-- The New York Times Book Review