SHOP OF HORROR

Wow. Here's a tiny, unassuming book that will chill your very soul: "The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald.

I was expecting a quaint story about a British widow who opens a book store in a seaside village in the 1950s. What else would you expect from a British author who didn't start writing until her late 50s? And that's certainly what I got — along with a disarming meditation on, well, pure evil.

Not the kind of evil where people get tortured and killed and whatnot. No. The kind of evil, rather, where people quietly have their souls crushed by their bland and boring neighbors.

It's a book about how we all are capable of screwing up one another's lives through laziness, indifference and a continuum of callousness ranging from self-centered insensitivity to cold-hearted calculation.

It's about how small things that could make a huge difference go unsaid. It's about the pitfalls of the path of least resistance that tempts us all. It's about plodding on even when defeat is a foregone conclusion. It's the maddening, but necessary, unhappy ending.

And it's a masterpiece of understatement, which makes it hurt and amaze all the more when you get knocked on your ass in the final scenes.