A genuinely frightening American Psycho That Hubert Selby Jr was a writer of prodigious talent is pretty much indisputable. He was a peculiarly American writer - possessed of the kind of fire that I sometimes think can only be ignited in a country where "artistic types" are looked on with real suspicion. It doesn't make for easy reading. The hero is a raging, nameless man in a prison cell, awaiting trial for a crime he claims he did not commit. Over the course of the novel, the reader is unsure of his professed innocence. The book takes place, in its entirety, in the cramped cell in which he finds himself confined, in the form of a rambling internal monologue. Written after Last Exit To Brooklyn, The Room comes across as something of a purging. Selby holds nothing back; he takes his scalpel and starts cutting deep into the most troubled parts of his hero's psyche. There are two main threads of fantasy that loop and intertwine throughout the book, sometimes cutting across each other like nagging voices in the mind of a split personality. The first is the jailhouse fantasy of himself as hero: the man who will stand trial, and blow the whole corrupt system wide open. This fantasy starts off in the realms of the vaguely plausible, but quickly escalates into grandiose chest-beating. He imagines himself a popular champion, standing on Capitol Hill, with the Senate listening rapt as he tells them of the conspiracy against him. The