Reed was addicted to Valium and Ativan for many years, and it's the hallucinations caused by withdrawal from them, as well as the panic attacks worsened by his kicking, that are the springboard for what is really a long reflective essay on what lurks in the unconscious and on the breakdown of defenses against recognising those hidden things, and more specifically how certain writers have deliberately or inadvertantly knocked down the barrier between inner and outer and used what they discovered inside in their works.

The writing that interests Reed is modern and in opposition to social realism and to 'the anaesthetized regionalism that suffocates most late twentieth-century British fiction'. Michaux and Kavan are discussed at some length; Proust, Cocteau, Trakl, and Breton are some of the other inner cosmonauts whom he contemplates. (But you needn't have read any of them to follow what Reed says.) The book isn't tightly organised, and that's all to the good: Wending from dreams to drugs to death and back again, interspersing the personal with acounts of other writers, observing rather than arguing, not only seem suited to the subject matter but to me give a stronger sense of what the author's saying than a more conventional treatment would have.

And Reed's style isn't a straitened one, either, and that too is all to the good here. As well, the book has some marvellous turns of phrase--'He smokes a cigarette with the elegance of someone choreographing the escaped smoke'--and beautifully atmospheric passages:

[on the Lonely Street of'Heartbreak Hotel'] ' . . . you just find yourself there and later on piece together the fragments of the mosaic leading to your arrival. It is usually raining. A blue rain. Sometimes the people have faces without features. Dogs pick through garbage in the streets. Soggy books, rubies and old photographs litter the pavements. . . The taxi that crawls down the street has no driver behind the wheel. . . You are too tired ever to sleep again. There is only one place to go: the blue, neon-lit hotel. But when you arrive in the entrance hall the desk-clerk is slumped over with a bullet-hole through his right temple. The stairs have been demolished. Spiders run in zigzag spirals across the fissured floor.'

A book that was hard to put down, that had me yearning to turn down page-corners despite its being a pristine hardback, and that has me annoyed now because when I finished it there were so many bits I wanted to re-read and I'd no dog-ears to help me find them.