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Ottessa Moshfegh’s first two books are, as she tells me, very different from one another But despite the contrast between McGlue (2014) and Eileen (2015), she acknowledges that ‘they come from the same imagination’ For one, both protagonists are New England misfits Moshfegh herself grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, where her parents immigrated after meeting in Belgium She descends from Croatian partisans on her mother’s side and a dispossessed Iranian billionaire on her father’s Newton is a town she has described as being the safest in America and possessing the highest number per capita of psychiatrists She now splits her time between Los Angeles and the California desert   The titular antihero of McGlue is a nineteenth century sailor with a hole in his head McGlue’s brains are spilling out and his memories too, the unpleasant consequence of enforced sobriety after he wakes up bloodied and befuddled to find himself accused of murder, possibly at the victim’s request The deceased in question is Johnson, McGlue’s friend, patron, beloved The novella lurches along a path of hallucination towards the moment of death McGlue’s prose evinces the concern of a former classical pianist turned experimental writer for sound and rhythm above elaboration of plot   Eileen, by contrast, arose from an attempt to appeal to the mainstream and Moshfegh’s desire to make writing a practice that could financially sustain her The result is a noir-by-numbers – literally written according to a manual – put through the Moshfeghian machine Eileen is a young woman in 1964 living in an unnamed town with her alcoholic father Eileen appears unassuming, but, she warns us, don’t be fooled She wears lipstick ‘not to be fashionable, but because my bare lips were the same color as my nipples At twenty-four I would give nothing to aid any imagining of my naked body’ Eileen is a kind of mutant creation in whom the damaging imperatives of patriarchy emerge in almost exclusively unintended and comedic ways   But Moshfegh’s gambit certainly worked Eileen was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and has been optioned by Scott Rudin for a film adaptation touted, in somewhat baffling whispers, as