Asylum (Penguin Essentials)

The New Yorker review praised Patrick McGrath's "ornate, deadpan style . . . distinguished by its unusual seriousness, its lack of camp," and described Asylum as a "layered, implicating book, whose terrors and malignities aren't quite the ones we expect, and are a matter of mood and viewpoint as well as of plot." McGrath's fourth novel (his other three are also highly recommended) features a subtly deceptive narrator whose confident, musical voice seduces you--a voice that mirrors, in its meter, emotions ranging from lyrically obsessed, to meticulously fond, to cautious and stiff with horror. And the imagery is unforgettable: the grim architecture of the asylum; a ravaged human head with empty eye sockets; a drowning in a pool on a barren heath.