Are there villains more squalid and vile than the narrator of GBH? Answer is there none. No, wait. The answer is none there. Dammit. None. None more squalid nor vile. A pornographer and snuff merchant who tortures and murders his way through his own gangland mob when threatened by rivals, a wife and sidekick nearly as bad as him, cops in his pocket and enemies under his heel. But something is going on and it's hard to put his exposed electric wires on it. We know it all goes wrong, though, because the story is split into the past, The Smoke, with Fowler at the height of his power, and the present, The Sea, with Fowler hiding out at a deserted out-of-season beach resort.

The disintegration of his empire and the disintegration of his mind are told with wonderful, calm and literate prose, reflecting the urbane civility of the man with monsters underneath. Utterly brilliant, searing and harrowing as he is brought low first by his ego, and then by the tiny sliver of a conscience he doesn't even know he has.