When I read Hubert Selby Jr.s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN as a kid, it seemed like the ultimate unfilmable novel: vivid descriptions of a hooker named Tralala getting gang-raped and violated; straight guys having sex with transvestites; vicious tenement wives calling to a baby on a balcony to make him fall. That it made it to cinemas in a colourful late 1980s adaptation is a testament to changing times as well as to how a book will highlight details that a movie can pass over. Selby, a moral and compassionate man compelled to wallow in the human undercurrents hed experienced, also came later to the screen via his REQUIEM FOR A DREAM: a searing account of addictions in a junkie and his mother, Darren Aronoskys 1998 film version indicting the American Dream and the chemicals that fuel it. (They ought to show it in schools, film writer Billy Chainsaw told Selbys editor, Ken Hollings. Kids would never touch the stuff.) But it was in the decade between LAST EXIT and REQUIEM that Selby wrote his edgiest pieces. THE DEMON, which preceded REQUIEM in the mid-1970s, placed the reader in the head of a successful businessman obsessed with casual sex as a form of blasphemy, finally escalating to the point of murder. If it was brought to the screen it might play like a manic version of Steve McQueens/Michael Fassbenders SHAME (2012), but with no casual opt-outs for the main character. But it was THE ROOM, which preceded it in 1971, which shocked even its own author. I mean, it is really a disturbing book, Jesus Christ! he later emphasised. I didnt read it for 12 years after I wrote it... The late rock poet Lou Reed, himself influenced by Selbys documentary realism, said THE ROOM put him in a place he didnt want to be with a character he couldnt get away from. Its not hard to see what he meant. The unnamed narrator is in a police cell for a crime he claims he didnt commit; he veers between moral self-righteousness, as he imagines himself a fighter against police corruption, and sick, sadistic fantasy when he fantasises about the torture and rape of a woman he knows. Both extremes exist in the same characters consciousness, making him all too recognisably human. If they ever filmed this one itd be so claustrophobically fetid that itd make LAST EXIT and REQUIEM, both controversial in their time, look like primetime family viewing. Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh) before her gang rape in Uli Edels film of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989).