As Sophie worries about whether the cat has infected her with rabies, Fox presents a series of additional small events that further reveal the couple’s fractured relationship: “They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom.” It’s impossible not to be affected by the undercurrent of alarm running through this slim little novel.Michael West is the bestselling author of Cinema of Shadows, Spook House, The Wide Game, Skull Full of Kisses, and the critically-acclaimed Legacy of the Gods series. This incident does not spark a cataclysmic fight, but in Fox’s able hands it gives us our first window into the tension brewing beneath the surface of this troubled marriage.

Otto has warned Sophie not to feed it Sophie does not listen, and when she sets down some milk, the cat bites her, breaking the skin. The story unfolds over the course of a weekend when a stray cat comes around. It’s 1970, and Sophie, a literary translator, and Otto, a lawyer, are a 40-something married couple who live in gentrifying Brooklyn. I first read Paula Fox’s “Desperate Characters” more than 20 years ago, and I often turn to it when I’m in a reading rut and want a book that can completely transfix me. Holleran’s prose is so luscious I wish I could reach out and touch it. “Dancer From the Dance” is an embodiment of the beauty its characters seek with such single-minded and sometimes desperate fervor. Holleran is funny, and his characters are at once entirely human and mythically aloof, but above all, he is a dazzling stylist. Its two protagonists, lovelorn Malone and extravagantly glamorous Sutherland, dance their way through the druggie ecstasies of the party circuit in search of transcendence.

A chronicle of gay life in New York in the 1970s, in the delirious years before the onslaught of AIDS, it is a book about a culture bewitched by beauty. I do not know why I opted to begin Andrew Holleran’s 1978 debut novel, “Dancer From the Dance,” last week, but it ravished me. So much of my literary life is project-oriented that I try to obey my more obscure urgings when they boil up and nag at me. Sometimes I know exactly why I pick up a book - I’m reviewing it, I’m reviewing something related to it, it’s high on the interminable list of books I know I ought to have read already, I saw an essay about it that galvanized me to crack it open - and sometimes I have absolutely no idea.

Spook House by Michael West