THE MEN FROM THE PIGS: James Lasdun, The Horned Man. A quick, creepy little fable about a gender studies professor who finds his life and identity slipping from his grasp as he becomes enmeshed in the circumstances surrounding a series of brutal murders. It’s… let’s say Philip Roth by way of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a fierce and reactionary tale, a horror novel under the skin. The descriptions are especially lovely–“the park, where the snow was now lying in raised veins along every shiny black branch and twig, forming an exact white replica of each tree.”

I’m not sure whether it’s too schematic. I was a bit twitchy on that subject, since several recent conversations with the Rattus had reminded me of the limits and failures of schematic fiction–and come on, it’s a doppelganger tale, they’re always a little bit geometry-of-symbols. Still, I think there’s enough dark weirdness here to overcome the math.