absurd and frustrating yet fascinating; boring yet somehow still intriguing; little to no action yet still compelling; mercifully short; ***SPOILER ALERT***as you read it, you know it will not have a satisfactory ending that brings the narrative thread to a neat, tidy ending, and you are, of course, correct: you get this sense almost from the first page, and you tell yourself that you shouldn't waste any more time reading this novel, but it is so short that you decide read it through nonetheless, and the more you read, the more bored you become, the more in the grip of the story you become; and the film scenes from "Psycho" that bookend the novel become the novel itself: excruciatingly slow progress in which you already know what will happen; absurdity and the tragedy of being are "Psycho", are this novel, are life as all three arc together into the Omega point in which we all become, in the protagonist's words, stones