The Driver’s Seat

“I aim to startle as well as please,” Muriel Spark once said, and in The Driver’s Seat (1970), her aim is all too true. Her most unnerving novel, this is a book to make the flesh creep. With fierce economy Spark focuses on her terrifying heroine Lise, who leaves her home in northern Europe for a southern holiday, apparently on the prowl for a lover: “If he’s my type,” she says, “I want to meet him.” But of course appearances aren’t everything. Pity and fear attend Lise’s final day. Superbly chilling, blithely evil, Lise takes the reader on a drive to Hell.