In a way the mainstream lit/horror lit divide reminds me of the way 80s rock bands used to be treated in the media. Overtly gothic Batcave bands would be routinely mocked in the hip music press for being too miserable and doomy, even as the more heterosexual grey raincoat/cardigan bands of the indie scene were frantically pumping out music a million times as dreary as anything the Specimen or Flesh for Lulu produced. And so it goes with all these respectable Booker prize-winning types, Collins being a case in point. He might not be a horror author, but god this is a grim book, despite its funny moments. One of the many wrongheaded review quotes on the book's jacket describes Collins' writing as tough and "macho", but in fact his narrator, a traumatized journalist in a failing local newspaper in the dead middle of 70s America, is sensitive and introspective to the point of neurosis and often beyond. He is fixated on industrial decay but also on food and peoples' weight, referring again and again to the fatness of the people he encounters or, if they are not fat, to their digestive disorders. He fears middle-age and obesity and fast food in the way you or I might fear the atomic bomb. The reader is never quite sure how much of this neurosis is shared by Collins himself, though I hope he has been able to derive some enjoyment from the fact that his book won an Irish literature prize sponsored by Kerry Ingredients (current website pic: a glistening close-up of a floating island desert.)

The style is full of repetition and angst, like someone telling a rosary while they wait to be sentenced in court, and the narrator's obsessions do pall at times. The narrator's voice and the dialogue are, at least to my British ears, convincingly American, but the heavily underlined themes impair that realism, since they are so resonant of what sneering Europeans tended to think of America in those days ("OMG look at all the violence and adverts and fat people!"). If you're looking for a light touch you will not find it here. Having said that, the book does run along well and there is usually enough humour in the narrator's sweaty-palmed mutterings to get by, with some nice Michael Chabonesque laughs here and there. It's also not as misogynist as you think it will be in the first few chapters. So, you know, it wasn't a complete waste of time.