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“... professional police espionage, counter-terrorism, peeping toms and voyeurs. Everyone is bugged. Nicholas Salaman has plotted his book so deftly, with almost plausible pranks and conspiracies, surprises and reversals, sexual depravities and savage cruelties, that it sometimes resembles a first-rate spy thriller. But, despite the melancholy ...”

“... his wife in a sand-dune. It is an excellent, profound and very odd second novel. The Frights is Nicholas Salaman’s first novel, and its material crosses at several points with Swift’s, though its treatment is quite different. Salaman’s prose is as rich as the celebrated fare of Cutcombe, the Somerset village ...”

“... What do coincidences mean? As I was reading Nicholas Salaman’s elaborately-patterned historical paranoia novel The Grimace, in which all the women the cracked narrator encounters are called Johanna, I came across the phrase ‘visions of Johannas’. It gave me a shock to realise that the song ‘Visions of Johanna’, by Bob Dylan, at which Salaman nods just this once, was at the same moment playing quietly on my stereo, which it does perhaps once a year ...”

“... from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying. Nicholas Salaman’s heroine Charlet, ‘falling apart’ in his new novel, has more to do with up-to-the-minute advertising copy than with 19th-century legal scrivening, and is neither a survivor like Wemmick, nor a martyr like Bartleby, but a victim ...”

“... marriage. Peter Prince works out the story of Hooper’s downfall in a pattern rather like that of Nicholas Salaman in his comparably excellent recent novel, Dangerous Pursuits: both authors introduce a rather congenial hero (with failings the reader may tolerate or secretly share), but when he has behaved sufficiently badly the author sternly punishes ...”