Simon Mason's first novel is a blackly comic portrait of a man who has spent his life constructing elaborate versions of himself, only to discover that fantasy eventually demands payment.

Death of a Fantasist follows Martin, whose grasp on reality becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the stories he tells himself. It is a novel about performance—not theatrical performance, but the everyday kind through which identity is assembled and defended.

What prevents the book becoming simply another novel about mental illness is Mason's voice. There is wit here, but never sentimentality; intelligence, but little interest in diagnosis as explanation. Although overshadowed by Mason's later work, Death of a Fantasist occupies an interesting place in British fiction of the 1990s, arriving before autofiction and contemporary discussions of mental health had become literary commonplaces. Readers drawn to psychologically complex fiction, unreliable narrators, and novels concerned with the fragile construction of the self will find much to admire here.

1995 Abacus paperback edition. Light edge wear and rubbing to covers; pages clean and internally very good.