RaveThe Spectator (UK)... perhaps his most remarkable and gripping work ... The agonies he describes with such unsparing honesty ... The paradox is that, for all his anxiety, Storey is lovely company on the page as he was in person. He offers riotous and sharp pen portraits of Lucian Freud and Ralph Richardson, and a deep consideration of his creative partnership with the director Lindsay Anderson. But the demons never retreat far. As a result the narrative is flecked with repetitions, while Storey’s prose is rife with dangling participles and botched pronouns ... feels less like bad style than an identity crisis manifested in syntax. The first-person singular seeps in everywhere ... His admirers should be grateful that Storey toiled for so long to provide such a densely drawn map of mental illness.
Elizabeth Kay
PanThe Arts DeskIn Jane’s jealous hatred of Charles, Seven Lies is at its most convincing. But with him gone, and with two twentysomething widows on its hands, the plot must look for fresh distractions. The anorexia of Jane’s sister Emma is shunted to the fore. The mother with dementia, during a visit from Jane, has a scary moment of Cassandra-like lucidity. A true-crime blogger posts sensationalist theories about Charles’s death which trample somewhat upon the libel laws. Frustratingly, these tangential melodramas are left to dangle flabbily rather than serve the plot\'s wider scheme, which is to supply Jane with a new rival ... The oddest mystery in this domestic noir is that the two bosom friends seem to have nothing fundamental in common. Jane doesn’t invite Marnie to her wedding, and withholds news of a personal trauma which, like an impotent ace of trumps, is played too late. Indeed Marnie barely exists except as an object of Jane’s toxic neediness ... [an] unedited pulse of triple-decker tautologies. It becomes a narcotising drumbeat, a monotonous rumble of hattricks, a Chinese water torture. Other readers may well feel better pleasured by the climactic twist. After all, and in the end, can 14 thriller writers and a million quid advance be wrong?
