The Death of Marat

In Steve Erikson's wonderful novel Amnesiascope the narrator reviews a film - the Death of Marat - that does not exist. Beginning as a joke, and assuming that his newspaper's sub-editors and fact-checkers will at least notice that the film was never made, he pens the whimsical review for a film he has made up only to find, to his horror, it published in full the next day.

Today the web hums with the peculiar tale of a book reviewer fired for reviewing a book that was never written. Odd, then, that life should have imitated art so far that his sub-editors, fact-checkers or any of the other people who exist to protect a newspaper from the more gratuitous whims of its writers should have failed to notice the tiny detail that the book in the review didn't exist. Perhaps the incident will inspire Britt Marie Mattson - the book's supposed author - to write the thing. Though personally I would much prefer it if it were Kristian Lundberg, the dismissed reviewer, who turned out to be fictitious and the whole affair a joke on the part of the Helsingsborgs Dagblat...