“And a little girl he adores,” added Campari. “He was almost forty when she was born. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times when he’s been taking her to the park. Yes, he’s a loving family man. Who’d have thought it?”

At any rate, although sales of Kloster’s books hadn’t yet exploded, as they later would, he had for some time, particularly since the publication of his tetralogy, been the writer we all wanted to destroy. Since his first book, he’d been too big, too good. Between novels, he withdrew into bewildering silence, which we found unsettling, threatening: it was the silence of the cat while the mice published their efforts. With each new groundbreaking work, we wondered not how he’d done it but how he’d done it again. And to make matters worse, he wasn’t even as old, as far removed from our generation, as we’d have liked. We comforted ourselves with the thought that Kloster must be from another species, a malevolent freak, rejected by humanity, shut away, resentful and alone, as hideous in appearance as any of his characters. We imagined that before becoming a writer he had been a forensic pathologist, or museum embalmer, or hearse driver. After all, he had chosen as the epigraph for one of his books the contemptuous words of Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’: “I had to fast because I couldn’t find a food I enjoyed. If I had found that I would have eaten to my heart’s content.”

On the back cover of his first book it said politely that there was something ‘unholy’ about his observations, but as soon as you started reading his work it became clear that Kloster wasn’t unholy, he was merciless. From the opening paragraphs, his novels dazzled, like the headlights of a car on the road, and too late you realised that you’d become the terrified rabbit, frozen, heart beating, and all you could do was continue, hypnotically, to turn the pages.