"who He?" by Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester's Manhattan is no mere backdrop but a pressure cooker where ambition, neurosis, and hidden violence can erupt at any moment. Through sharp, ironic narration, he turns the city into a frontier of modern survival, then plunges into the glittering machinery of Who He?, a live television variety show whose comedy, money, and egos are balanced on a knife edge. When a disastrous New Year's broadcast masks a death above the stage, the story becomes both a show-business farce and a psychological mystery. At the center is Jake Lennox, a hard-driving writer whose drunken, fractured life splits between public role and private collapse. After a chaotic encounter with Aimee Driscoll, he realizes he is not the man he thought he was and staggers through sleet and blackouts toward the theater, trying to reclaim himself. Backstage, he finds crisis everywhere: a disputed quiz answer, a furious producer, a threatened lawsuit, and an agent's ugly claims over a song. As threatening letters from "Guess Who" and the mysterious Knott deepen the suspense, Lennox is fired, then drawn into the ruthless world of Borden's Oleomargarine, where charm, betrayal, and corporate power sharpen the novel's dark satire of fame, ownership, and identity. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.