Anthony Cummins
I Know What You Did This Summer
James Lasdun’s memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, told of how he was stalked by a female ex-student whose lurid claims endangered his reputation. By his own account, a minor and benign consequence of this ordeal was the taste it gave him for Patricia Highsmith, whose ‘anxiety-saturated’ psychological thrillers eased his dread. To judge from Lasdun’s new novel, Highsmith has been an inspiration as well as a consolation. A stealthily nasty tale of social envy and sexual deceit, sifted through the worldview of a damaged outsider akin to a not-so-talented Tom Ripley, The Fall Guy looks very much like Lasdun’s stab at a 21st-century remix of his favoured comfort reading, with the comfort stripped out.
The early pages crackle with a gut-level sense of menace that it’s tricky to pinpoint. When Charlie and Chloe leave Brooklyn to spend the summer at their second home upstate, Charlie’s London-born cousin Matthew
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Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553