At Night by Dixe Wills, book review: Nature, darkness, ripping yarns, and ingots of history
If a writer pumps up the volume of a book's ideas or impending events from the very first sentence there's a risk of a subsequent literary burst tyre. Franz Kafka's Metamorphoses maintained the brutally surreal nature of its opening line: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."