The Zoo

A totally f**ked up story that I loved!

This book tells the story of a successful ad-man's descent into insanity told in alternating scenes: from his current post-breakdown life in a psychiatric unit, and the months immediately before when he was working on a new advertising campaign - the tainted account that ultimately brings his drug and alcohol-fuelled world crashing down.
He is a fascinating unreliable narrator and I love the fact that you're always second guessing what he says. In the now, James Marlowe finds himself sectioned, living a life of almost constant horror, beset by frightening and paranoid delusions. Abandoned by his beloved wife and child and shunned by fellow inmates, James lives in terror of The Zoo, a collection of children's toys - plastic figures who exert a malevolent hold on his imagination and guide him in increasingly disturbing ways.
The Zoo is a mesmerising story. Bleak and dark, devoid of even a chink of hope until the absolute end. It had me hooked from beginning to intense and extraordinary end. Powerful. Astonishingly good.