I’m scared of Ian McEwan.

There. I said it.

More than ‘Uncle Stevie‘ King. More than Poe, or MR James, or Susan Hill, or Ian Banks. More than any other writer I can think of.

McEwan has made me gasp with horror, as easily as a magician might if they beheaded someone on stage. Then he’s made me stand and applaud.

It isn’t simply the early stories. Or because of the murders, misunderstandings, or emotional wreckage he leaves scattered across his novels.

I fear him because he can still ‘get to me‘.

I hate him. At the same time, I love him.

I love McEwan because I hate him. How twisted is that?

No matter how experienced or ‘mature’ a reader I flatter myself I am, Ian McEwan knows how to get under my skin.

That’s why I hate him. And love him. He seems to know me too well.

I first encountered McEwan at university, where he seemed to be everywhere on our syllabus.

There were the unsettling early works, the short stories that lingered unpleasantly in the mind, and later novels such as Atonement and On Chesil Beach (2007), which I’ve since inflicted on many sixth-formers.

No apologies for that, students.

By the time I read Atonement (2001), I was no longer a naïve student discovering literary tricks for the first time. I already knew that novels are constructed things. I believe, and did then, that literature is a kind of magic trick: our job as readers is to work out how the illusion works.

Then McEwan made me throw a book across the room.

I wish I were exaggerating.

The ending left me furious. Not disappointed.

Furious. Livid.

Furious enough that, in a university seminar, our lecturer eventually stopped the discussion and asked everyone else to listen while I attempted to explain why I was so angry about people who had never existed.

That’s the trick, of course.

The best writers persuade us to care deeply about events that never happened and people who never lived. McEwan is particularly good at it. Good enough that I now approach his novels with a degree of caution.

The quotation above comes from Atonement, a novel obsessed with guilt, forgiveness, and the uncomfortable question of whether stories can ever repair real damage.

Or if you can construct your own truth if you repeat it often enough.

I am still not entirely sure of the answer.

But I remain in awe of anyone capable of making a grown man argue passionately with a work of fiction long after he has closed the book.

Over to you: tell me about a text or author who’s got under your skin.