Acts of Revision by Martyn Bedford

Description

A brilliant portrait of a psychopathic breakdown.

Acts of Revision plunges the reader into the world of Gregory Lynn–a place at once terrifying and irresistible, where fantasy and reality, guilt and innocence blur beyond recognition.

Gregory Lynn is thirty-five years old, a bachelor, and an only child from the age of four-and-a-half. Scarred by childhood trauma, he lives a solitary life, sequestered in his London house, drawing cartoon fantasies to pass the days. In his drawings, he has control; by drawing things, he sometimes makes them happen.

But the world has a way of creeping in. Gregory’s mother dies. And he discovers, in a dusty box in the attic, the long-forgotten school reports whose words are the unending refrain of a man sentenced to failure at an early age. “Must work. Little progress. Disappointing.”

Gregory Lynn reads, and teachers and subjects, names and places. The history teacher who humiliated him. The geography teacher who threatened to expel him. The gym teacher who called him donkey. And on and on until, as methodically as a professor laying out a lesson plan, Gregory Lynn prepares for the cold-blooded acts of revision that will even the score with those who make him the way he is–seven deadly subjects in all.