The afterward reveals the book to be a labour of love for the author. A deeply felt reaction to a crime commited before his birth and the murder of his own mother.

In truth even without the afterward it's not hard to understand that the book is passionately personal.

It has a smoky dizzy atmosphere like a dream or a bad trip or insipient madness. An increadibly physical book, as you're pulled hotly along you can feel the bones breaking, the cuts opening, the blood flowing, the characters breathing, sweating and it's a unstable physicallity that confuses violence and sex and indeed by the end the difference between the two isn't always readibly discernable. And in tandem the whole concept of love become amorphous, confused but strangely all encompassing. People love the people they kill, hate the people they love, corpses become objects of desire and passionate love affairs include three of four people at a time.

This physical primacy means that in the background one notices the plot sprawling off into some kind of unholy mess - characters appear and dissapear, plot threads are taken up and the die with a whimper, so many lies are told that it's hard to keep track of what's happening and the ending twists so frequently that even after the last word oone has the feeling that perhaps something more was meant to be said.

But it's an effective mess. The whole point of the book is it's apparent messiness - like Betty Short's tangled corpse - it's nasty, shocking and fascinating.

LA becomes a hell. Casual, violent racism, objectification of the poor and women, corruption, hopelessness and a lot of nasty, powerful people on the make.

There aren't any entirely admirable characters in the book. Few who do the right thing in a tough situation and "Good" as a concept doesn't really exist. The protagonist is often deeply suspect and his catalystic role is more equivalent to a bull in a china shop than a traditional hero. He's violent, clumsy and insataibly curious. Meaning that accidentaly punching the right person is frequently the way forward. But beneath his rawness he is also shrewdly clever, a dazzling detective that just isn't respectable enough.

Interestingly enough I just read "House of Leaves" another book set in LA featuring people drive mad by obsession. However whilst that book was a dry accademic excersise, this book made me belive it and made it scary.

Finaly it should be noted how effective a period novel it is. Whilst it takes a few leads from the hard boiled noir genre it uses the real lived in past to over turn the cliches or to fill them with truth. The language is not always entirely transparrent but it is vivid and worn in and alive. The politics are convinvingly byzantine and the intertwining of real events of the time, the film world and the characters personal lives works beautifully.

To be fair, this book isn't a complete waste of time, indeed in places it's genuinely scary and it's frequently entertaining, the use of unusual typography works well; the rapidly decreasing words per page in certain sections helping to create tension and excitement, and in other places making the book work on the level of visual art. As halfway through the book, it loses narrative entirely, descending into endless lists in the footnotes and boxed in mirrored text and distortions, I felt the book was at it's best. If it had concentrated on that it would have been startling. On the other hand the Navidson Project detailed in the book is full of great ideas - there's something genuinely unsettling about the idea of a infinite labyrinth of nothingness appearing in your front room. The ideas are great and there's an awful lot of ambition which should be worth 4 stars in and of itself, however everything else in the book is increadibly tedious.

Danielewski's prose is mostly serviceable but often loses focus becoming tawdry and over blown. His characters are two dimensional and irritating. The treatment of women in the book is shocking. Every female character that turns up first imparts information then has sex with Johnny Truant. Whilst I'm not neccesarily against a book detailing the sexual exploits of the main character, they are unspeakably adolescent encounters, the women are all surgicaly enhanced, shaved and bouncy and spend their time with Truant trying to reenact moves from porn films, all of it feeling rather tawdry. Elsewhere in the book the female protagonist is, of course, an ex model and promiscuous. Truant's love interest is a stripper and his mum - the only non sexual women is mad.

On top of all this Zampano's reflections on the Navidson Project film, which make up the bulk of the book are horribly pompous. It reads like the worst kind of cultural studies onanism. Pretentious, over wrought and increadibly pleased with itself. And worst of all boring. Having to read about characters doing increadibly cliched predictable things once is bad enough having to read 20 different pseudo intellectuals give their theory on why the character did the cliched predictable thing is enough to send one screaming off into madnesss like the characters in the book.

Supposedly it's a satire of this kind of academic nonsense and in fact the book seems to try and side step criticisms with irony. The writer draws attention to some of the worst bits of writing and there's a suggestion that the treatment of women and the characters in general is a show and not to be taken seriously. That doesn't stop it being bad however, the idea that the writer also thought it bad just irritates me more.

Still I'm rather bewildered by the good press this book got. It seems to have got great reviews and perhaps I'm reacting to raised expectations. On the other hand the book gets a great deal of leeway, I feel, for the central premise of the book which seems to have caught peoples imagination. I can't help but feel that this is something that'll fade. Looking back the book arrived shortly before The Blair Witch Project and then after that Big Brother whhich makes the work feel less like a work of innovation and more like a work atuned to the zeitgeist. Making it seem ultimately gimiky. Not that that would matter at all if it were well enough written but it wasn't.

At the end of the day it could have been a great exploitative horror story but certainly not the serious literary work it seems to think it is.

Wasn't sure if this was a three star or a four star book, but the ending pushed it up to a four. A fairly simple story, straightforwardly told but manages to be suprising because it feels so honest. The characters are cursed with the same bloody minded awkwardness as real people and their actions equally unpredictable.

It is in a sense I guess an anti love story but it's one with a glimmer of hope. I spent most of the book feeling that the main charcter was horribly grieved and that the book was unnecesarily moralising, her fate seemed way out of proportion to her "crime". Inddeed I was reticent about agreeing that it was a crime, guilty as she was of perhaps being trivial and superficial but it was society that forced her into a loveless marriage.

However the ending was suprising and poignant and managed to lift the book and one could almost say that the book had a slightly feminist tilt.

Still a bit of a shame that a book about China features no real chinese characters but it's pretty much highlighted from the beginning that the Chinese are the frightening "other" to the English inhabitants and the book plays off ot as well as half condemning it.

I was suprised by Wuthering Heights. It's always hard when reading classics; too many expectations, too much baggage but with Wuthering Heights I'd managed to get it all wrong. I suspected it to be The Tragic Love Story and liking books of that sort had bought into the popular myth of it and guessed I'd like it.

I'd not expected, then, it to be quite so disturbing, quite so powerful and violent and transgressive and I'd not really expected to love it quite so much.

It's more like a dream than anything else but even as your reading it, it defies expectations pulling in many different directions all at once but always succeeding, it's terrifying, beautiful, repulsive, brutal, sad and pathetic often in a single page.

Neither Heathcliff nor Cathy are particularly likeable, in fact it's hard to think of a likeable character in the whole book but none the less they manage to be sympathetic and understandable.

Not much more to say except that there are pasages in that book that are amongst the best things I've ever read.

And as an added bonus it's hard to read it without hearing Kate Bush's voice in your head. Which is always nice