The Automatic Man

by Sam North

You know what the difference is? It’s something frightening that’s left behind when the bewilderment, the anger, the growling plans for revenge and the utterances on justice have all been worked out and cast aside. It’s the answer. It’s what it all boils down to. It is fear that makes all the difference.
In a bare flat in a city tower block a young man is engaged in a struggle for survival. The victim of a particularly vicious mugging, he is in the grip of fear — a fear with a smell and a presence. Violence seems to stalk him, waiting to happen; places must be avoided and people kept at a distance; even certain words are unsayable. He is forced into bizarre deceptions and desperate stratagems to conceal his vulnerability, until finally — after the reader has been drawn inexorably into a world distorted by imagination — he reaches a form of resolution.
A terrifying portrayal of urban paranoia, utterly original and often very funny, The Automatic Man is an astonishing debut.

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 1989

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review will be short because I can remember almost nothing about this book, a short month or so after finishing it. I recall elemental savagery, haunting emptiness, and good writing, but also a gladness to be done with it. I suspect the book could be better than I'm scoring, but when my memory has automatically sent all thought of it to the 'junk' folder beside the merest trace of there being some substance, I can't really score otherwise.