Of Insects, Tech and Cannibals

In the opening pages of his first novel, Consumed, David Cronenberg flicks out a series of images. We see stories and characters on a MacBook Air, an iPhone and a BlackBerry, meanwhile eavesdropping on a conflict over camera lenses—a 105 mm macro versus a 24–70 mm zoom—all of it so technical that the reader imagines Cronenberg standing behind a monitor on set directing the novel as he would one of his films.

The authorial Cronenberg seems as much a character as his characters, an acute and often amused intelligence who frames the story for his readers within reiterated rectangular boundaries. Monitor or book, we are looking over his shoulder through the earlier part of his novel, the action feeling distanced rather than intimate, while Cronenberg himself remains acutely present.

Of course, what a film audience...