First Love, Last Rites [is] possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set thirty years ago. Unlike Wilson, McEwan is not concerned with the teeth-baring of vicious little snobberies in an exhausted, class-ridden society; the England of his fiction is beyond all that—a flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and reclusive monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect sickening detail…. With the exception of one piece ("Solid Geometry"), [the stories] are not really classifiable as examples of latter-day gothic; if nightmares, they are well-lit, waking nightmares, for there is nothing imprecise about them, no dislocations of time and space, no lapses in causality.

Much of the coloration and some of the preoccupations of First Love, Last Rites are...