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WORK TITLE: Read Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE: http://www.leobenedictus.co.uk/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in London, England; married; wife’s name Sarah; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Oxford University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Worked as an advertising copywriter until 1999; Guardian, London, England, worked as subeditor; freelance writer, 2002–. Holland Park School, London, writer in residence.
AWARDS:Media Award, Amnesty International UK, 2005, and Race in the Media Award, Commission for Racial Equality, 2006, both for the article “London: The World in One City.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Guardian, Literary Review, London Review of Books, New Statesman, Observer, and Prospect.
SIDELIGHTS
The name Leo Benedictus has the ring of a pseudonym, which would be in keeping with the metafictional flights of satire and horror to which he lays claim. The byline also appears, however, above numerous conventional articles in periodicals like the Observer, New Statesman, and Guardian, where he is credited alternately as a subeditor and features writer. Benedictus entered the job market as an advertising copywriter, but by the age of twenty-five he had found a more comfortable niche in journalism. His immigration article “London: The World in One City” received an award from Amnesty International in 2005 and a Race in the Media Award a year later. His fiction explores the city from a very different perspective.
The Afterparty
Benedictus’s first novel, The Afterparty, is a satire–almost a parody–of the vacuous lives of celebrities at a momentous point in their lives. In this “topsy-turvy postmodern tour de force,” as Olivia Laing dubbed it in her New Statesman assessment, a nerdy poser named Michael Knight wangles his way into a celebrity party, intending to report via email to aspiring novelist William Mendez. Mendez is trying to impress a potential literary agent with his unpublished novel, Publicity, which is purportedly a satire of celebrity excess. In The Afterparty, Michael’s emails alternate with chapters of the novel, which Mendez eventually attributes to a Guardian contributor named Leo Benedictus.
Michael’s emails from the party reflect his status as a naive outsider to the celebrity lifestyle of excess and emptiness. The famously reclusive film star Hugo Marks has emerged from seclusion to celebrate his birthday with an ostentatious return to public life. His supermodel wife Mellody reveals herself as a drug addict out of control at the worst possible moment. Calvin Vance is a beautiful but dim-witted extreme-sports competitor who hopes that sexual dexterity will win his elevation to the celebrity stratosphere.
The party takes a puzzling turn when Michael begins a transition from observer to participant in impending disaster. Questions arise when Mendez is so reluctant to meet his potential agent that he surrenders attribution to Benedictus. The distinctions between the novel about a celebrity party and the reality of the party in progress begin to fade, and the tension begins to rise.
Benedictus the character introduces a marketing promotion that launches a third plot line, and readers are forced into the role of detectives, trying to determine whether they are reading three stories, or two, or one. Benedictus the author has provided “an emotional depth that meta-fictions often lack,” Laing concluded. James Smart commented in the Guardian: “This debut ties author and reader in engaging knots” that linger long after the party is over.
Read Me
Read Me is another story within a story, with an unusually gruesome ambience. The narrator, “N”, introduces himself in his journal as a simple man of cordial manners and honest intentions. He is, in fact, far from honest or simple. N is a stalker, headed inescapably from observation to action at the most vicious and gratuitous level imaginable.
Independently wealthy via inheritance, N rides the city buses for hours, watching people–usually women and usually from a distance. When he catches sight of Frances from an adjacent office window, he is inspired to move closer. When she loses her marketing job after anonymous email accusations of theft and fraud, N is driven to avenge her unjust termination by every means possible. Instead, “he dismantles and destroys her life,” Melissa Broder reported in her New York Times review. First he watches, then he sends emails to her coworkers. He installs hidden cameras in her home, then he stalks her from a van parked outside. According to Broder, it is not always clear whether N’s journal entries reflect wishful thinking or acts of violence–until Frances’s former employer ends up crushed beneath a passing subway train.
This part of the novel, which was published in England as Consent, the name of the software package that Frances had been promoting, generated cautious approval. “The contrast between the narrator’s tone and the unsettling nature of his actions” reminded a Kirkus Reviews contributor of the John Fowles classic The Collector, updated to reflect current concerns over “social media, constant surveillance, and toxic masculinity.” Broder noted that the character of N is so engagingly drawn that “it can be easy to forget that he is a sociopath.” A Publishers Weekly commentator, on the other hand, reported that “the narrative feels unnecessarily complicated” and the character of Frances, the victim, is reduced to a mere backdrop for the narrator’s obsessions. Barry Forshaw observed in his Financial Times review of the British version, Consent: “The reader’s mounting sense of dread resides in the fact that we realise that nothing can be done to protect her.”
The second half of the story depicts a sequence of torture and mutilation so sadistic and graphic that some critics described it as sickening, yet so compelling that they could not turn away. One of those critics, Phil Harvey, wrote in the Washington Independent Review of Books that N’s habit of “sliding from first-person to third-person narration and back again, usually without warning” adds to the sense of disorientation. He then added: “N’s journey from relatively harmless obsessiveness … to malignant deception … to sadistic violence might have been moving, but the ghastly torture sequence sucks all the oxygen out of the book’s second half.” He felt compelled to race to the end “hoping that nothing so awful will happen again.” Despite the mixed review, Forshaw concluded: “There is no denying the ingenuity with which Benedictus constructs his tale.” Cameron Woodhead noted in the Sydney Morning Herald: “It’s a fiendishly clever book, though not for the soft-hearted.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian (London, England), February 18, 2012, review of The Afterparty, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Read Me.
New Statesman, March 14, 2011, Olivia Laing, review of The Afterparty, p. 47.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (March 23, 2018), Barry Forshaw, review of Read Me.
First Story, https://www.firststory.org/uk/ (October 7, 2018), author profile.
Leo Benedictus website, http://www.leobenedictus.co.uk (October 7, 2018).
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 29, 2018), Melissa Broder, review of Read Me.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 18, 2018), review of Read Me.
Sydney Morning Herald, https://www.smh.com.au/ (February 26, 2018), Cameron Woodhead, review of Read Me.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (August 10, 2018), Phil Harvey, review of Read Me.
I write novels and articles.
My first novel, The Afterparty, was published in 2011 by Jonathan Cape and Vintage.
My second, Consent, was published in February 2018 by Faber in the UK and Commonwealth, and will be published as Read Me by Twelve in the US and Canada, Nieuw Amsterdam in Dutch, Rizzoli in Italian and Etta in Swedish.
Feel free to email me at leo@leobenedictus.co.uk or message me on Twitter at @leobenedictus. I will reply.
My agent is Sophie Lambert at C+W.
My film agent is Katie Haines at The Agency.
Please don’t send me press releases or feature ideas. Thanks.
From sketchwriter: Leo Benedictus was born in London in 1975 and graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English. He worked as an advertising copywriter in the late 1990s and has written freelance for the Guardian and others since 2002.
In 2011, Leo’s debut novel, The Afterparty was long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and was described by the Independent on Sunday as ‘Shockingly accomplished… fearlessly funny…but what really sets the fresh style, biting satire and postmodern gymnastics ablaze is the brilliance of the writing…’. His second novel, Consent, is being published in the UK and abroad in 2018. He lives in Brighton with his wife Sarah and their two sons.
Leo is writer-in-residence at Holland Park School, London. Find Leo on his ...
Leo Benedictus was born in London and graduated from Oxford University. He worked as an advertising copywriter and as a freelance sub-editor for The Guardian. His work on immigration issues has earned him widespread recognition: his article “London: The World in One City” won the Amnesty International UK Media Award (2005) and the Race in the Media Award (2006). His work has appeared in Prospect, The Observer, The New Statesman, The London Review of Books and The Literary Review. Leo’s debut novel, THE AFTERPARTY, was long-listed for the 2011 Desmond Elliott Prize. Leo is currently a freelance feature writer for The Guardian and lives with wife Sarah and his two sons in Brighton. Leo is writer-in-residence at Holland Park School, London.
Review: Paperbacks: Fiction: The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus (Vintage, pounds 7.99)
The Guardian (London, England). (Feb. 18, 2012): Arts and Entertainment: p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: James Smart
The famous folk that populate Benedictus's intriguing first novel show little talent besides the ability to consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol, make small talk and attract disaster, in this instance a fall from a roof at a London party held by a movie star. The unsurprisingly motley crew of musicians, film-makers and hangers-on includes Michael, a shy journo who sneaks on to the guest list. His tale emerges via budding author William Mendez, whose email dialogue with his agent punctuates this book, both commenting on the story and becoming a plot strand in its own right. Mendez craves anonymity so lets a Guardian journalist, one Leo Benedictus, put his name on the novel. We are, of course, in edgy, postmodern territory here. Benedictus is analysed as "a merry sort of cove, with a taste for provocation", and there are several irksome touches, but <
James Smart
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: Paperbacks: Fiction: The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus (Vintage, pounds 7.99)." Guardian [London, England], 18 Feb. 2012, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A280405813/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2bd31d7. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Print Marked Items
Benedictus, Leo: READ ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Benedictus, Leo READ ME Twelve (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 7 ISBN: 978-1-5387-1147-7
A stalker insinuates himself into the life of his target, with horrific results.
When he first appears, the narrator of this novel seems polite and even self-deprecating. "I have only tried
to live by simple principles with doggedness and honesty, and with an open mind," he says; it's a simple
code, and one that seems innocent enough. Quickly, however, his actions demonstrate that he has a much
more sinister agenda in mind: watching a young woman as she sleeps, his movements quiet so as not to
wake her. Over the course of the following pages, the narrator reveals that, due to an inheritance, he's
become independently wealthy and that he has a penchant for stalking women. It's Frances who draws him
in the most--and, gradually, Benedictus (The Afterparty, 2011) shows both how the narrator monitors her
and how his efforts to disrupt her life turn a successful career into something that disrupts her psychological
well-being.<< The contrast between the narrator's tone and the unsettling nature of his actions>> creates a host of
tension, and in its best moments this novel suggests a reimagining of John Fowles' The Collector for an age
of<< social media, constant surveillance, and toxic masculinity>>. Unfortunately, in the novel's second half, its
narrator engages in a series of even more horrific acts, turning a work of psychological suspense into
something more visceral. And while the narrator's self-deluded solemnity makes for a number of creepy
jolts throughout, having the book written from his perspective has the effect of marginalizing Frances--
making the conclusion feel flat rather than chilling.
When Benedictus' thriller clicks, it does so vividly--but it never entirely explores the full weight of its
resonant themes.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Benedictus, Leo: READ ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d3f127dd.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Can't stand the Heat
Olivia Laing
New Statesman.
140.5044 (Mar. 14, 2011): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2011 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Afterparty
Leo Benedictus
Jonathan Cape, 384pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
Considering the publishing industry's insatiable appetite for celebrity memoirs, it is odd that more novelists
aren't tempted to get in on the game, populating their works with the likes of Elton John and Simon Cowell,
to the accompaniment of ringing cash tills. The realms of The X Factor and celebrity drug addiction tend to
be spurned by the serious novelist, cropping up instead in those pink-jacketed volumes that are aimed
squarely at the readers of Grazia and Heat.
It takes a certain chutzpah, then, to staff one's debut with supermodels, "pop pups" and Elton himself, but
these are among the milder risks taken by Leo Benedictus in what amounts to a <
writer, William Mendez, and an agent, Valerie Morrell, who he hopes might represent him. These missives
are interspersed with chapters of his unpublished novel, Publicity (later retitled Publicity*****, the stars
"perhaps ... implying the book has had a rave review", as Mendez dolefully explains).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Publicity is the story of a celebrity party that takes a nosedive, and the narrative whirls briskly between four
main characters: Hugo Marks, the reclusive film star whose birthday it is; his wife, Mellody, a drug-taking
model of the Kate Moss school; Calvin Vance, an X Factor contestant as pretty as he is dim; and Michael
Knight, an awkward, physically unattractive sub-editor who's gained an invitation by chance and who
provides an outsider's wide-eyed view on events as they unravel.
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It's little wonder Valerie's so excited: Publicity is a cracking satire on celebrity culture (the scene in which a
pop star reminisces about having sex with a dog is a particular triumph and should certainly scoop a place
on the Bad Sex shortlist). Mellody gulps down ketamine (an event that necessitates typographic mayhem of
the kind Jonathan Safran Foer excels at), while Hugo weeps snottily over the burdens of fame ("I spend half
my time terrified of losing everything, and the other half feeling guilty about having it"), and the vapidity of
the celebrity existence is laid gleefully bare.
The email framing device initially seems to offer little more than a way of riffing on the travails of
publishing. In time, though, it gains a tense momentum all of its own. Why is Mendez so unwilling to meet
with his putative agent? Is it possible Publicity isn't quite the book it seems? Soon a character called Leo
Benedictus has entered the frame, and a digital marketing strategy is being planned that bears an uncanny
resemblance to that of The Afterparty.
The danger with this sort of postmodern high-wire act is that it can fall a little flat emotionally, but that's not
a criticism that can be made here. Without giving away too much of the trickery, what seems particularly
well contrived is the way the two levels of narrative act something like a triangulation device, with the real
story existing somewhere in between the lines. This has two results: it allows the reader some pleasurable
detective work and it provides <
than another sleight of hand only underlines what a very deft writer Leo Benedictus - or is it William
Mendez? - proves to be.
Olivia Laing's book "To the River" will be published by Canongate in May
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newstatesman.com/books
Laing, Olivia
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Laing, Olivia. "Can't stand the Heat." New Statesman, 14 Mar. 2011, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A252865089/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ac9d493.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A252865089
Read Me
Leo Benedictus. Twelve, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-5387-1147-7
In this chilling yet disappointing psychological thriller from Benedictus (The Afterparty), an unnamed narrator keeps a written record of his unusual hobby: stalking. When his aunt dies and leaves him a fortune, the narrator is given all the free time he needs to indulge in the stalking of random women in an unspecified city, spying on them via webcams and hidden microphones, as well as simply overhearing conversations. His one rule is not to become personally involved with any of his victims—but he breaks that rule when he spots Frances, a beautiful young woman who works for a consulting firm. Frances has just been suspended because of an anonymous email accusing her of fraud and other misdeeds. The narrator takes it upon himself to mete out justice (or vengeance) on Frances’s behalf where he thinks it necessary. Switching back and forth between the first and third persons, <
A Psychological Thriller Asks, Are We All a Little Stalker-ish?
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Leo Benedictus
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By Melissa Broder
Aug. 29, 2018
READ ME
By Leo Benedictus
256 pp. Twelve. $26.
Early in Leo Benedictus’s creepily thought-provoking novel “Read Me,” the unnamed narrator — a London man who has made an unpaid vocation out of stalking strangers, mostly women — asks, “Did I really find my new life on the first day of looking? Much easier to believe it was already somewhere in me. … Have I been someone all my life who would do what I’ve done? Or am I just somebody who did?”
It’s the rhetorical use of philosophical questions like these that make the novel self-reflective. The narrator, who is the supposed “author” of the book before us — a memoir of his deeds as a stalker — befriends us. He invites us to engage with his inner dialogue. He is not overly charming, but still intelligent and warm enough that<< it can be easy to forget that he is a sociopath>>. At times he is profoundly good at rationalizing some very disturbing behavior. At other moments his manipulations are so cruel, his acts of violence so vile, that it feels profoundly disconcerting to have ever been seduced by him.
His eerie shadowing begins when he unexpectedly inherits a large fortune from his aunt. The sum changes his life in an uncomfortable way. Rather than being “set free” by the money, he finds that the newfound freedom it gives him is actually much greater a burden than was the daily struggle for fiscal survival. To quell his anxiety, he rides city buses. He becomes an observer of others — an activity that quickly escalates from simply watching to stalking.
Image
The novel centers largely on his pursuit of Frances, a young woman with a blossoming corporate career, and the ways<< he dismantles and destroys her life>>. In meddling in her affairs, the narrator must break one of his own rules, namely not making contact with or intervening in the lives of his subjects. His interest in Frances is born out of jealousy, of both the existential and misogynistic varieties.
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When he first spots her, it’s through the window of a neighboring office building where he’s carrying out a different stalking mission. She is leading what appears to be a successful presentation on a new, “flexible working structure.” In this moment, Frances is happy. There is much cheering and she is clearly beloved. The name of the new software? “Consent.”
The reader watches as the narrator turns Frances’ life to chaos, imposing on her his own perception of the fleeting nature of human relationships, and of meaning itself. The more he controls every detail of his surveillance — from emailing her co-workers damaging misinformation to bugging her home with cameras and parking outside it in a van — the less she controls any aspect of her life.
“Read Me” is constructed not as a linear tale but rather in layers, sometimes recounting what the narrator actually sees and at others deploying an assumed omniscience. At times it’s unclear whether the narrator is simply imagining Frances’ life or whether what he describes is actually occurring. This is especially true when it comes to her thoughts, an effect that underscores some of the novel’s most important questions regarding the limits of genuine connection and empathy. Is it possible to ever truly know another person from within the prism of one’s own story? Is philosophical knowledge merely a projection of our fantasies onto others?
In the midst of the book’s most gruesome scene, the narrator quotes Epicurus in an attempt to engage his victim: “Whatever causes no distress when it is present, gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated.” Yet his victim is in pain, and so the words are no salve. Unable to connect, the narrator dryly observes, “All he does is bleed.”
Melissa Broder is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Pisces.”
Read Me: A Novel
By Leo Benedictus Twelve 256 pp.
Reviewed by Phil Harvey
August 10, 2018
An unusual character study veers gruesomely to torture.
Read Me is two books, really. The first half of the story follows a narrator/protagonist, N, as he stalks several women, following them surreptitiously and attempting to infect their lives, usually without meeting or touching them. The second part of the book is dominated by an extended scene that is so gruesomely awful it will sicken you.
The author’s style, presumably employed to help illustrate N’s obsessive mental condition, includes <
There are no quotation marks around quotes and no speaker tags; this creates more work for the reader than is necessary to showcase N’s mercurial and psychotic persona. We understand that he is mentally and emotionally deranged.
N’s self-examination, sometimes linking his thoughts with thinkers such as Einstein, Murkowski, or Montaigne, drags on, but when events — even tame ones — are unfolding, his thoughts can bounce around interestingly. The dilemma that seethes in his mind as he sits near a new target on the subway, for example, is involving.
The woman gets off at her station, leaving her phone on the seat. Should he grab it and give it to her? That would violate his rule: no contact with the target. But if he leaves the phone there, someone else may take it to her and thus he, N, would be interfering in her life by not returning her phone. Expressed through N’s psyche, such wonderings become interesting.
The stories told in normal narrative fashion are well-written and engaging. N is particularly taken with a woman named Frances, and the account of the disruption of her life when she is falsely accused of fraud and disloyalty to her employer is compelling. So are the events leading up to the murder of Frances’ employer (a nice, simple murder!), who ends up beneath the wheels of a rushing subway train.
The exploration of a sick man’s mind can be a worthy subject. <
Despite this, the book retains some memorable characteristics. N’s twisted relationships with his targets are hard to forget and sometimes revealing. The author, an award-winning features writer for the Guardian, is obviously talented. His first book, The Afterparty, was also stylistically challenging (a book within a book), but its layer of satire aided its execution.
There is no satire in Read Me. It might have benefited from some. Readers of this book should be prepared for landmines lurking among N’s innocent-seeming mental peregrinations.
Phil Harvey’s short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines. His most recent novel is Show Time (2012).
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Consent by Leo Benedictus — what the stalker saw
A crime novel that climbs inside the mind of a psychopath
Barry Forshaw MARCH 23, 2018 0
Creepy, obsessive, insidiously persistent: stalkers deserve a prominent place in any catalogue of contemporary social evils. Celebrity cases and growing anxiety about the decline of privacy in a high-tech era have helped give their activities a grim salience in recent years. It is this unease that Leo Benedictus expertly taps in his second novel, Consent, a queasily compelling thriller.
In a disturbingly chatty first-person narrative, we follow the progression of Benedictus’s unnamed protagonist from mild sociopathy to deadly menace, a transition facilitated by a legacy that makes him a multimillionaire and leaves him “rich enough to do anything”. Once he has selected a target, he uses every means available, from voyeuristic peeping to electronic surveillance, to become a hidden part of her life, although he mostly avoids face-to-face meetings.
The prey in Consent is management consultant Frances, who is suspended from her job after an unspecified email complaint. Cast adrift and nurturing a nagging desire for revenge on whoever is responsible for her dismissal, she does not realise that she is being stalked, still less that her stalker is prepared to take extreme measures against those around her. All of this is recorded in unsparing detail in the protagonist’s notebook as he inveigles himself ever deeper into Frances’s life. <
What is perhaps most unsettling is the narrator’s voice: philosophical and apparently possessing self-knowledge (he is well versed in Montaigne), yet deeply deranged. Its tone is horribly chummy, as when he introduces himself to the reader: “You’re being very patient. You want the nitty-gritty, and you’re right . . . Me: who am I? . . . The word that many would apply to me would be stalker, but applying doesn’t make it so. I’d say instead that I practise people studies.” At the same time, there is a chilling lack of affect, even during gruesome episodes. Motive remains obscure. “I imagine being asked Why? and my answer is always that the feeling . . . doesn’t have a name that I know, but it’s in the same family as the lure of cliff edges and car accidents.”
Those who have read John Fowles’ The Collector may find Consent’s central premise familiar: in that book, too, a disturbed individual comes into money that allows him to stalk a female victim. But<< there is no denying the ingenuity with which Benedictus constructs his tale.>> His first novel, The Afterparty (2011), took a sardonic look at the world of publishing, with a version of Benedictus himself woven into the narrative (a notion recently repeated by Anthony Horowitz with The Word is Murder). No such tricks here, though there are metafictional games involving the notion of a book within a book. There are other current novels about the subject of stalking (such as Dirk Kurbjuweit’s Fear), but Benedictus ensures that the familiar elements are outweighed by his innovative approach.
Consent, by Leo Benedictus, Faber, RRP£12.99, 240 pages
Barry Forshaw’s ‘Historical Noir’ will be published next month by Pocket Essentials
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Consent review: Leo Benedictus' psychological thriller grips in a disturbing way
By Cameron Woodhead
26 February 2018 — 11:32am
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Consent
Leo Benedictus
Consent. By Leo Benedictus.
Consent. By Leo Benedictus.
Photo: Supplied
Faber & Faber, $29.99
Consent is a dark and intricate psychological thriller, with glints of social satire, that will appeal to fans of Chuck Palahniuk's best stuff. It's creepy from the start, as an unnamed narrator – educated and rich (he has inherited a vast fortune from his aunt) – reveals a dreadful obsession. He is a stalker of random women, and no ordinary one, using his wealth to insinuate himself into the lives of his subjects in a way that reminds you of John Fowles' The Collector. Most of the novel is dedicated to our man's latest project, a career woman who finds herself clinging to a loose rung of the corporate ladder, about to fall headlong into an elaborately constructed web. <