Joan Smith
Caught in the Web
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
By James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape 218pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
In old-fashioned crime novels, the residents of a sleepy English village are occasionally scandalised by a spate of anonymous letters. It’s usually small stuff, about supposed affairs or minor financial transgressions, but the effect is devastating. In the modern world, it’s all much easier: no need to go to the bother of disguising handwriting or cutting letters out of newspapers. There’s something about the Internet that seems to give people permission to send malicious emails or post poisonous words online. They adopt self-aggrandising pseudonyms or don’t even bother to hide their identities; the chances of being punished are not that high, and the impact – to a deranged mind at least – is intensely satisfying.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This rude spectral activity was a far cry from the moaning and chain-clanking traditionally associated with hauntings. It had a distinctly modern flavour.'
@LucyLethbridge on a real life haunting.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-woolworths-poltergeist
'I inadvertently saw "Saturn Devouring His Son" in my early teens and it was a very unsettling thing to come across.'
@robinsimonbaj on Goya.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-painted-it-black
'The narrative moves fluently between the raffish ... life he was living there, his main love affair and friendships – most of them kept up for a lifetime – and his journalism.'
Jeremy Treglown weighs up Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-long-road-to-leopoldstadt