Glover's Mistake (2009)

The balding, burly David Pinner of Glover's Mistake is a pitiable wet blanket who pecks out his daily frustration on an irrelevant London website called the Damp Review. His chronic depression seems harmless, but when the female artist he worships falls for his handsome flatmate, Pinner becomes an Iago with an IP address. His virulent obsession, cloaked beneath a feeble disposition, sows the seeds of misery for the love triangle. Yet Nick Laird deftly balances empathy for his seemingly overmatched ''ugly duckling'' with an unflinching account of Pinner's calculating crimes of the heart. ''Our culture is too old for love,'' Pinner believes, and if the author doesn't agree, he at least understands the dark side of desire. B+