THE FRIDAY BOOK: Subversive Literary Games of Sadistic Titillation ; Seven Tales of Sex and Death Patricia Duncker Picador, Pounds 12.99

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PATRICIA DUNCKER has trouble sleeping at nights. Unlike other novelists who might lull themselves with their favourite passages of Proust or Jane Austen, she watches trash television - B movies in particular. Her latest literary project is a direct response to the images, themes and sheer visceral enjoyment that she finds on her screen.

If one part of Duncker's imagination is steeped in Hollywood cliches, the other is steeped in European literature. She is the most allusive of contemporary writers. From the postmodern playfulness of her first novel, Hallucinating Foucault, through the cross-dressing protagonist of her second, James Miranda Barry, to the Freud- and …