From his time in the USA negotiating a possible film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Subtitled ‘An Anglo-American Tragedy’, Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’ is a short novel about the excesses of a Californian funeral business. “… a thoroughly horrible and fiendishly entertaining book… Rarely in fiction have such execrably bad taste and such cruel wit been combined in one short satirical novel…. Its humors are ghoulish and its hyena laughter snarls obscenely.