These Are Only Words

Is he your neighbour? Is he your colleague? Does he have a file on you? I think of myself as a collector. Let him tell you his story. He is a city-centre shopworker who cultivates a facade of blandness to hide a secret life. For him, surveillance is an artform at which he can excel. Peeping Tom. Pervert. Stalker. That is not me. But soon he's getting too close. As he becomes increasingly entangled in the individual stories he is documenting, his fascination with the tragic account of a 19th century French pornographer becomes a catalyst for new obsessive connections. However, he quickly discovers that human interaction in the modern, metropolitan world is a hazardous project... This just isn't going to end well. An urban chameleon, a Tom Ripley for the new millennium, an insanely gifted technofreak: Simon R. Biggam has created a sociopath for our time. These Are Only Words is a chilling dissection of identity and alienation from a bold new talent in contemporary fiction.