Bunker Man

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 28 APR 1997

When newlywed Rob Catto moves to his wife's hometown on the Scottish coast and takes a job as head janitor in the local school, he discovers a mysterious vagrant who spends days in the woods behind the schoolyard, nights in an abandoned seaside bunker. At first an object of horror, the bunker man soon becomes an alter ego to Rob, the incarnation of his own sadistic fantasies. Often disturbing (especially in its graphic descriptions of Rob's affair with a desperately lonely 14-year-old who hopes to find love by living up to her reputation as a "slag"), McClean's prose races along at breakneck speed, pausing only briefly to establish Rob's sympathetic qualities before it plunges him into depravity. McClean, the Scot whose 1993 story collection Bucket of Tongues won the Somerset Maugham Award, has crafted a gripping novel--full of anger, fear and brutally mysogynistic sex--about an unimportant man who invests himself with sickening power. Author tour. FYI: McLean founded The Clocktower Press in Edinburgh to publish fledgling Scottish writers. A staunch fan of Texas swing music, he wrote a book about his travels in that state that will be published in Britain in August.