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Which is ok, quite close to the usual comfortable carry-on we have with an author. Every chapter begins with her reaction to what she’s just read and we’re interested by this. In this novel we’re usually on the outside ring, looking in at Susan being manipulated in some possibly malevolent way by her ex. We’re in some fictional space that’s not quite the same shape as what we’re used to: instead of sitting inside a comfortable circle with the author, where we know exactly where we are, there seem to be concentric rings.

Ok, we might not be the sort of readers who normally read this stuff: the story of Tony is hardly Pulitzer material. She’s hooked – and he’s betting that we’re hooked as well. We’re alert to what’s going on, aware that Susan is also a fictional character, and that her judgments of the story aren’t ‘real’ but a sort of game being played by Austin Wright. You can see why it was cited in the entry for metafiction.

This creates another layer of – what? – engagement: she’s wondering why he’s sent it, why he’s subjecting her (specifically her) to the awful events she’s reading about. So, as we read, she’s reading it as well, living the nightmare as well. So… she’s the Susan of the novel’s title, and she’s reading about Tony, an invention of the man she hasn’t been married to for twenty-odd years…. Because this thriller has been written by Susan’s ex-husband, and he’s sent it to his her to read. The story is a page-turner: we’re inside Tony’s head, living the events of an awful night and worse morning with him.īut that’s not the point, or not entirely. At the end of Part 1 the worst has just been confirmed: his wife and daughter, who’d been taken off by the bad guys, have been found murdered.

A nice, middle class man finds his world suddenly turned inside out when he happens to be slightly outside his normal sphere. There’s a real mystery/thriller at the core of it, Nocturnal Animals, one of those ‘what if’ stories that the film critic Philip French called yuppie nightmares. A quotation from a review of it was cited and I ordered a copy -second-hand, because it’s out of print. Ah. I came across this book by accident – by looking up the word ‘metafiction’ in an online version of the OED. Tony, on the other hand, is just a character in the novel that she is reading. To the end of Part 1 of the ‘Tony’ story: Chapter 10 of Susan’s story that frames it