The Shards: A novel

He read the suicide story twice against the racket of steel blades grinding single estate beans. Something rankled. There was a prolonged and dangerous-sounding hissing, and a solitary stream of espresso poured into a white cup. Edward Fellowes jumped from the bridge late on Thursday night. But there were any number of bridges along the Tyne, why w

Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes.

She would say, though, that the blurred boundaries were precisely the point, that it’s exactly in that place of orgasmic bliss or, sometimes, sheer terror where the stuff we normally keep repressed floats to the surface, ripe for transformation.