From its premise, The Minor Outsider sounded like a fairly generic love story goes wrong book, with the draw of dark humour and it supposedly being a voice for our modern times. What I found it to be, however, was the worst parts of these, written in a style that was trying to hard and came across badly.

Ed is an unlikable main character, which is fine and often makes for a great book, but his weird way of focusing on Taylor’s innocence when they first meet (and how he’d like to exploit it) and his constant ignoring of her for the image of her he’d built up in his head made it difficult for me to see him as anything more than a creep. Combined with him being secretly comfortably off but pretending otherwise, Ed was too much of a selfish, self-entitled whiner to be a particularly engaging character. The book’s style did not help, as the style constantly tells the reader things about people - such as personality traits or how they usually act - without showing it, particularly in the earlier part of the novel. In my opinion, this made the book feel very clunky, and though it became more enjoyable to read later on, my initial impression could not be dispelled.

The plot quickens pace near the end and Ed’s spiralling out of control is more engaging than much of the rest of the novel. The quirk of most of the rest of the characters also being different kinds of writers is quite fun, but unfortunately it might be better if the novel had more of a focus on them than on Ed, a self-entitled and boring character without the intriguing values of an anti-hero.