In Between the Sheets

"[2] In The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers praised McEwan's "quiet, precise, sensual touch," calling him "a writer in full control of his materials" and describing his England as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail.

"[3] In the Washington Post, Terence March described McEwan's prose as "clear as a windowpane," and ranked the author as "a gifted storyteller and possibly the best British writer to appear in a decade or more.

"[4] Hermione Lee of New Statesman referred to the stories as “seven elegantly gruesome accounts of derelict and perverted lives [that] cannot be dismissed after the first frisson: their peculiar images of pain and loss seem, retrospectively, to grow in depth.”[1] A year later, again in The New York Review of Books, writer and critic V.S.

His subject matter is often squalid and sickening; his imagination has a painful preoccupation with the adolescent secrets of sexual aberration and fantasy.

Moynahan praised "To and Fro" as an "elegant stylistic exercise", but panned the title story, arguing "The see-saw relation between life and art that is implied goes back to Pater, Wilde, Mann, Yeats and a host of other writers active at the turn of the century.