THAT DIETH NOT by H. Russell Wakefield

“Driving was an agony to me at first; I imagine a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent pedestrian,…”

Cross-referenced above by random chance with my previous review earlier today of ‘Throttle Body’ HERE. A remarkable co-frisson.
Meantime, in this Wakefield story, a self’s duality is portrayed in a “sex-crime” trauma as we follow the marital difficulties of the introverted, writerly narrator’s ‘I’ numbered 1 and 2, or even higher numbers of his selves, as he tells us of their or his own irreconcilable chasm in a marriage to socialite Ethel, then her child abortion by miscarriage, leading to his love affair with another woman, and his mental breakdown or was it a genuine return of Ethel whom he tells us he murdered, in a climax that is genuinely most disturbing, with a panoply of mixed motives and nightmares that are far more powerful than I believe Wakefield could ever be in such a mainstream evocation of madness — a tension between an inner madness and a genuine haunting by a revenant that third parties or his other selves also experienced, not a traditional ghost story at all. Why haven’t I read it before? The Future of the Novel, a book’s pages as once slithered out by its protagonist’s shadow? —“flung them by handfuls in the fire.”

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The context of above review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/28/the-frontier-guards-by-h-r-wakefield/