T here’s a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan , Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama. Nicholas, the book’s narrator, is that sort of kid. He goes on to talk about a four-year-old girl found dead of exposure in a Chicago housing project, whom he learned about through a friend’s stepfather, a police officer also in possession of photographs of the interior of Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment (‘pictures the newspapers never got’). It’s the 1990s, the heyday of US serial killers, before they passed the mantle to mass shooters. When it c

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