James Lasdun

The Horned Man

"James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing...when we read him we know what language is for again."—James Wood, The Guardian

The Horned Man opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying tale of a man losing his place in the world.

As Lawrence Miller, an English expatriate and a professor of gender studies, tells the story of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to frame him for a series of brutal killings, we descend into a world of subtly deceptive appearances where persecutor and victim continually shift roles, where paranoia assumes an air of calm rationality, and where enlightenment itself casts a darkness in which the most nightmarish acts occur.

As the novel races to its shocking conclusion, we follow Miller as he traverses the streets of Manhattan and the decaying suburbs beyond, in terrified pursuit of his pursuers. Written with sinuous grace and intellectual acuity, The Horned Man is an extraordinary, unforgettable excursion into the lethal battleground of desire and repression.

This long-awaited debut novel demonstrates that James Lasdun ranks among the most brilliant of contemporary writers; as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, "Mr. Lasdun surprises us again and again, by painting in the details of his characters' lives with such authority and imagination that we become thoroughly absorbed in their dramas."

"A beautifully imagined story, singular in its observations of human life and the shifting realities of ourselves and all that is around us."—Paula Fox

"There are hints of Nabokov and Chandler in this superb piece of invention and implosion. Lasdun's wide-ranging imagination and wit is bounded only by a brevity compared to which Raymond Carver seems wordy."—Dale Peck

"A wonderful first novel from a writer with a poet's gift for precision. The Horned Man is an elegantly troubling, and often very funny, fable of sexual obsession and urban unease which Lasdun brings to a genuinely startling culmination."—A. L. Kennedy

"The Horned Man is a beautiful and deeply disturbing book, one that defies simple explanation. A man's life begins to unravel at the mercy of what appears to be a conspiracy, and in James Lasdun's deft hands, this dissolution assumes the harrowing, irresistible power of a nightmare."—Jennifer Egan