Amis and McEwan are now friends and have formed (in the minds of many readers at least) something of a "school" of writing with their contemporary Barnes, who began publishing fiction in 1980.
McEwan's collection In Between the Sheets contains a greater variety of fiction but still plenty of unsettling material, and The Cement Garden, his first novel, which appeared in the same year, amply confirmed some expectations. The sensational account--rendered in unnaturally unsensational prose, courtesy of a first-person narrator partly responsible for the horrors he narrates--of a family of solitary children who occupy themselves with hiding the body of their mother, regression to infancy, and incest, it seems to confirm the assessment of Jack L. Slay Jr., focusing particularly on the early work, that "McEwan's writing is characterized by a literature of shock, a conscious desire to repel and to discomfit the reader. It is a fiction inundated with incest, regression, brutality, perversion, and murder." McEwan, by the way, has repudiated the suggestion that he wrote out of "conscious desire" to shock and has expressed a--perhaps disingenuous--wonder that his stories seemed too upsetting to some readers: he told John Haffenden, "I don't sit down to think about what will unsettle people next" and testified to his surprise when critics were shocked by his stories.
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