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The Horned Man
by: James Lasdun

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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099428350
ISBN: 0099428350
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: February 06, 2003
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 66820

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Bit of a letdown.
The novel starts off well, very well. I bought the book because of the strength of the first two pages; it had me enthralled. But most of the novel is a bit aimless and dry. It seemed to me that the writer had not really envisioned the story as a unified whole, merely moving the strained plot forward to exhibit his pretty prose and intellectual insights into psychoanalysis. He has talent, no doubt, but this is not the novel to read if you want an satisfying story.

Rating:

- The Horned Man

James Lasdun's debut novel in 2002, The Horned Man, followed several successful collections of poems and short stories, one of the latter being adapted by Bertolucci for the cinema. The Horned Man attracted good reviews but it wasn't until Lasdun's Booker listed follow up Seven Lies that he became well known in literary circles.
The Horned Man is easily as compelling and brilliant as Seven Lies. It opens with echos of the stark, persecutory shock of Kafka's The Trial - the reader learns immediately that something is amiss. Laurence Miller, an English expatriate in New York, teaches Gender Studies at a college near Manhattan. He is separated from his wife Carol and desperately wants her back. He sits on the Sexual ... Read More:

Rating:

- Intriguing at first, then flops badly at the end
The author doesn't put a foot wrong in the early chapters of this psychological thriller, building up a convincing atmosphere of dread and uncertainty through a web of delicately interwoven events past and present. His debt to Kafka dawns soon enough on the reader, but it doesn't matter too much - he more or less acknowledges it, anyway, by bringing a Kafka story into the plot. Where the novel disappoints hugely is in its ending, which is plain silly.

Rating:

- Darkest depths illuminated - brilliant black comedy
I have to say I haven't laughed so much so ina while - albeit, nervous, howling maniacal laughter - at the predicament of unbalanced hero Lawrence Miller in his descent into madness. Lasdun's superb prose creates a totally authentic (inner) voice for a neurotic modern lecturer in a trendy modern college (what the hell is Gender Studies???) who becomes convinced of a plot to frame him for all manner of crimes. Of course - it's all in his imagination (i think) - the moved bookmark, the missing coin, the deleted computer file, the mysterious love letter, the strange death and disappearance of two of his predecessors. Miller is such a delusional (Alan Partridge?) character that it is soon obvious that his sanity is disintegrating into a ridiculous ... Read More:

Rating:

- Don't believe a word
It wasn't until I got to the end of this book that I realised what it was all about. In fact I reckon there are probably a few readers out there that still don't get it. Fortunately (?) I've known someone that behaved a lot like the narrator which helped. That someone is no friend of mine I hasten to add.

Difficult to say much more than that really, without giving the plot away. Suffice to say though that for the revewer below who's into unreliable narrators this book must have been the nuts.

Books : The Horned Man