In many ways, Fear is a three-sided suspense novel. Though without any of the usual suspects. Set in contemporary Paris, Fear is the main character.
Fear is a writer of the type that is usually prefaced by the word starving.
He doesn't live in a garret, but his grotty rooms are garret-like enough for a modern character. He had turned off the ringer on the telephone, and he had turned down the volume on the answering machine, and he had wrapped the answering machine in a sweater, and he had put the answering machine and the sweater into his suitcase and jammed it shut, cutting a hole in the lip of the case with his Swiss army knife so that the lead would be able to pass through. But he could still hear a distant click when someone called, followed by his own voice, muffled, unreal, echoing within the case as if he, and not just the tape, were lodged inside. Lane's humor is sufficiently understated that children of the soundtrack generation might not know where to laugh. Somehow, that makes it funnier still.