This is a brilliant book by a brilliant writer. Unlike so much contemporary genre fiction in which killers are portrayed as inhuman two-dimensional monsters, Hughes portrays Dix Steele as a human being gone horribly wrong. Though the story is told in third person, we see the world from the killer’s perspective. We occupy his unsteady mind as he becomes increasingly unhinged, and we see how his actions arise from feelings that most people experience as difficult and uncomfortable but that he experiences as intolerable, torturing, and unresolvable.