The Second Curtain

This is a really brilliant piece of work... a portrait of quiet desperation that turns exceedingly nasty, as the hapless narrator gets himself into terrible trouble, hanging with bad companions. This is not a happy story, but it is the sort of thing that will stay with you long after more trivial entertainments have faded. Fuller has a disturbing insight into the terror of mortality. A terror that seeps slowly into the proceedings until the freefall of the ending. It's also a perfect-pitch portrait of post-war England, the dreary melancholy of the recently ended death and destruction never far off. It's only after you finish the thing that you realize how elegant and adult and expressive the writing is. More than a few modern novelists with better PR could learn a some things from Fuller.