Silly, surreal and sinister, it's long since past time that I got around to reading it. I was always a big fan of At Swim Two Birds and The Best Of Myles, so it's a mystery why it took me this long. Anyway, a work of genius, published after its' author's death and every bit as influential on modern literature and culture as, say, contemporaries and admirers Joyce and Beckett. The story of a murderer who finds himself confronted with his victim, apparently alive, and who visits a police station and the people and the things he discovers there, by turns inane and extraordinary, amazingly sublime and deeply creepy. Extremely funny, with satirical interpretations of physics and logic and philosophy as well as the celebrated footnotes concerning the celebrated De Selby, but ultimately rather chilling and nightmarish, it ranks as one of the great works of 20th Century literature, let alone perhaps the greatest work of 20th Century fantasy.

This edition comes with some additional material, including a potted biography of Brian Nolan and some pieces on the text itself. Appropriately enough, the short piece on De Selby reads almost exactly like a De Selbian footnote.

*Reread this for a panel at WorldCon, er, tomorrow, as it happens, and the prospect of attending a convention every day for five days does have sinister hellish-going-round overtones, thank you very much for suggesting that thought, brain, taken by surprise once again by just how damn weird it is while at the same time being thoroughly prosaic. Became slightly fixated on the idea that there were footnotes to the footnotes that were too small to be observed by the human eye, and those footnotes had more footnotes all the way down to the subatomic infinity. Also, since I have just read Cronin's biography giving social context to the book, still wondering abut the book's appearance on the TV show and how a book written on a island with a small population concentrated on a coastal spot with an inland full of incomprehensible strangers, opressive, paraniod, haunted by holy secrets, and that eeveryone with any sense is trying to get away from could possibly be relevant to Lost.