Death and violence are always a great pitch.

So says Erma Bridges, the protagonist in Iain Ryan’s mind fuck thriller, THE SPIRAL.

Erma is an academic specialising in gamebooks, and those of author Archibald Moder, in particular.

Moder is an ex psychoanalyst and a real peculiar in this particular.

Ryan’s narrative plays out in two realms, which interweave and intersect, inciting incidents that propel the protagonist into the plot, in this case, spiralling around a set of conjoined narratives.

These conjoined narratives provide THE SPIRAL points of departure where a singular life shears into two realms, and then intersects, providing in turn, points of arrival.

In fiction, these are the inciting incidents of a story. The incident is a portal. The character pushes through it. The character is not supposed to to crawl back through, though, to go back to the intersection and reconsider her options. To do this breaks the story and the story is the reality of fiction.

Erma Bridges is caught in the reality of her own fiction. The reality of that fiction intersects with the stranger than fiction facts that include incursions into an other’s imaginary world.

In whichever realm she is operating, reality seems to recede in the rear view mirror, and lucid, lurid fantasy looms head-on, an intersection collision impatient to happen

It’s like Tolkien meeting Stieg Larsson, with Erma Bridges as kick-ass as Lisbeth Salander thanks to a proficiency in Muay Thai, fracturing the factual, less lethal against the figments she falls prey to.

The other reality propounded by THE SPIRAL is fate. Fate fetes us all, fate born of free will, choices made creating links in a chain. The nightmare of dreams spirals into the nightmare of reality.

THE SPIRAL by Iain Ryan is published by Echo