The first story in James Lasdun’s latest collection of fiction, It’s Beginning to Hurt, is called “An Anxious Man.” Half of the book’s sixteen witty and harrowing narratives could bear the same title. And nearly all of the stories could be subtitled “The Anxious Reader”: Lasdun’s ability to unsettle his readers, to usher them within a few sentences into a state of high anxiety, is peerless. Poe, Kleist, and Spark, step aside! Lasdun makes the wind whistle through your heart. He’s the scariest writer since Jonathan Edwards.
Lasdun is spiritual heir to that brilliant evangelical writer and preacher rather than to the more sanguine Franz Kafka, with whom he is often compared. He’s borrowed from Kafka the haplessness and impotence of his protagonists and a knack for conjuring up a wonderfully ominous atmosphere, but he rejects the emotional distance and playfulness on which the surreal depends. Lasdun creates moods so immediate, so threatening, and so dire, that, in comparison, Kafka’s Letter to My Father seems like it could’ve been sent from Camp Granada.
Like Edwards—and unlike the preponderance of Lasdun’s peers—Lasdun wastes no time “celebrating the resilience of the human spirit.” He has a more urgent task: to sear into the reader’s mind, as the preacher says, that “It is no security to a natural man that he is now in health… . The manifold and central experience of the world in all ages shows that this is no
