Consumed

The first novel from the greatly-admired and award-winning film director, David Cronenberg. In Paris, Hannah, a journalist, investigates the strange case of a famous French intellectual couple: the wife has been killed and apparently eaten, and the husband has disappeared. Meanwhile, Hannah's partner Nathan is reporting on a renegade Hungarian doctor's new cure for cancer. Consumed is exactly what fans of Cronenberg's films would expect from his first novel: hypnotic, darkly comic, with vividly drawn characters moving through a landscape that at first seems alien, only to become curiously familiar. It is dark yet mischievously humorous; recognisable yet disturbingly uncanny. There is an interest in - and fetishisation of - technology, and the way we interface with the world; there is an undercurrent of perverse sexuality. In it, the imaginative brilliance of J.G. Ballard is married with stylistic verve of William Gibson.