Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre

I really didn’t know what was going on in this book for much of the time. It is very slow in the unraveling, even though it is housed in the form of a novella and so can easily be read in a couple of hours. It is a horror story of sorts, throwing a computer sciences professor Ariel up against a creepy family in an equally creepy Victorian guest house on the British coast. But DBC Pierre didn’t really give himself over to the horror, and seemed more concerned with concocting weird conversations that didn’t hang together and equally weird events. I suppose they were clues but I didn’t get them. The main character Ariel is on his way to meet his lover and the whole thing revolves around the frustration of not being able to communicate because phone signals are not working. His attempts to communicate on a borrowed phone have the sense of one of those nightmares where everything moves slowly and you try to do something and can never execute the action. And I’m sure that’s deliberate. So I found this a disconcerting book, a bit annoying to read because I had no idea what to make of it and wasn’t entertained enough along the way to finding out what it was all about.