This was Linda drained of Lindahood, less a person than a sentient body, no realer than words on a document, struck from subject into object—that is, things that felt terrible felt like her. Possibly this new pain would be her great achievement, possessing all the qualities she’d wanted for her writing: a pioneering agony that both straddled genres (thriller, mystery, horror) and defied them, baroque and maximalist, enveloping her with its belabored detail and longeurs, high modernist in its stern insistence on a total universe, its difficulty.
