In a page or two they have become the correlative of Susan's anxiety. As their car rushes through the night, there's something suspicious about Tony and his family, something uncannily naive in their chatter that only intensifies and actualises itself with the duel on the highway.

Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there. It's a competent effort, somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Donald E Westlake, and though the pay-off is rather diluted by our awareness of Austin Wright and his issues, it remains satisfyingly grotesque. Dismayed by his passivity during the incident, his inability to help himself or his family, Hastings is manipulated by an angry detective into chaotic acts of revenge. Driving his wife and teenage daughter to their summer cottage in Maine, middle-aged professor Tony Hastings allows himself to be sucked into a futile duel with another car, the occupants of which later kidnap, rape and kill the two women. Nocturnal Animals, which we read along with Susan, is a thriller. Invented.' Some of the terror – and all of the strangeness – of this judgment emerges from Tony & Susan, which, tanking despite extraordinary reviews on first publication in 1993, now resurfaces in an attractive edition from Atlantic. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: 'You. He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. Wright, who died in 2003, was the epitome of the academic as novelist. But Austin Wright's packed and deft first page has already made it likely that we'll read his. Will she read Edward's novel? She's not sure. On one hand she's intrigued, interpreting the gesture as 'reconciling and flattering' on the other, she's irritated because it threatens 'the peace she has made with her past'. Twenty years after the divorce – a period during which Susan has had nothing from Edward but a Christmas card signed by his second wife – she receives a letter asking her to read his first novel, Nocturnal Animals. His need to write, we learn immediately, was the 'chief cause of trouble' in the marriage of Edward and Susan. Her ex-husband Edward – known to Arnold as 'that old bastard' – has become a writer. Meanwhile, she 'runs the house, pays the bills, cleans and cooks, takes care of the kids'. W hen Susan Morrow isn't worrying, 'she worries lest she's forgotten what she's worrying about'.

Nocturnal animals austin wright