This is quite unlike my normal tastes in fiction. Anyone who knows me and knows what I read will tell you without hesitation that I like simple prose, that I like good old-school science fiction. I like fiction where the plot is the be all and end all. Okay I like the stories to be well written, I do not enjoy poor writing even when the plots are excellent. But mood pieces and highly descriptive prose do not normally feature in my reading selections.

This book though is much more a mood-driven piece than a plot driven piece. The most important parts of this novella are the insights into the thoughts of the characters, and the atmosphere of the apartment itself.

Max Gorshen lives in an archetypal American apartment - the kind you might see in many US movies. He does not live alone in this apartment though, he shares it with "the other", and unnamed man with whom Max cohabits but does not interact directly (their only contact being in the form of notes they pass each other) and the apartment's third inhabitant, Langley - a very talkative and seemingly intelligent parrot.

There is a strong sense of menace throughout this book, a presence in the apartment along with the two men and parrot.

I am glad I picked this book up, despite my usual tastes lying elsewhere. The writing contained herein is superb. There is a definite feeling of paranoia running through this book, and you get to experience the thoughts of a man very much on the edge.

The location of the novella is also wonderful, the apartment itself, set in an anonymous building within an unnamed American city. This type of apartment can serve to isolate its inhabitants from those who live just through the walls and floor. The author uses the common understanding that the effect of cramming people together in these vertical boxes serves to increase their desire for privacy and their dread of what happens behind others doors.

In some ways this is an uncomfortable read, but a very compelling one. Any time you read something allowing you into another's thoughts there is irresistible desire to take a peak, whilst simultaneously a feeling that you shouldn't be there.

Synopsis
Max Gorshen lives in a dark, hot apartment in a medium-size, though unnamed, north American city with someone he refers to only as "the other [man]", who, Max tell us, lives in the apartment's "long, dim hallway". Max and "the other [man]" never seem to encounter each other in the apartment (although Max sees "the other [man]" mingling with and bedeviling "the interlopers and trespassers" on the city streets below the window Max sits at while he writes the novella), though they talk to one another through letters and brief notes: neither man is certain the other man really exists. Both of these characters live with "Langley", a very talkative and apparently highly intelligent African gray parrot. Something else exists in the big apartment, too, and all three first-person narrators (Max, the other [man], and Langley) lead us to believe that it is something vile.