Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal -- and revel in -- their obsessive desires, Homes creates in <I>The End of Alice</i> a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.