Amazon.com Review
Giles De'Ath is a widowed British novelist so obstinately old-fashioned that he speaks of the "current fad for videotape recorders." Caught in the rain one afternoon, he ducks into a cinema and inadvertently finds himself watching something called Hotpants College II, where he first gazes upon an American heartthrob named Ronnie Bostock. Initially denying even the possibility that he might be experiencing a homosexual crush, De'Ath soon finds himself giving in to this "strange and bothersome distraction" by scouring teenybopper magazines for articles like "20 Facts Ya Didn't Know About [Ronnie]!!" "As someone who did not know any facts at all about him as yet," he notes, "I confess I felt a certain onset of excitement."

Gilbert Adair's narrative--it might be more accurate to call it a novella instead of a novel--is a precise depiction of romantic obsession and frustration. Narrated by De'Ath, it is thus somewhat more internally driven than the excellent 1998 film adaptation starring John Hurt and Jason Priestley. Love and Death on Long Island can be easily polished off with a few hours' reading, but its nuanced characterization of a man who trades restraint for recklessness is well worth savoring. --Ron Hogan