The writings of British author Tom McCarthy, including his fiction and his essays, focus above all on violence. And while the novels are by no means short on acts of physical violence—for example, the many acts of political violence depicted in his 2007 novel Men in Space, or the violence of World War I in his 2010 novel C—McCarthy is also concerned with violence in an expanded sense that will take center stage in this chapter. In a 2010 essay on the fiction of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, McCarthy connects violence to another of his long-standing obsessions: the movements, positions, and relations of things in physical space. McCarthy names a moment in Toussaint's 1985 novel La Salle de bain [The Bathroom] where the narrator throws a dart into his lover's forehead as an example of “space being brought into its own, made present in the only true way possible: through acts of violence.” With several references throughout this essay to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, McCarthy makes it clear that violence in its expanded sense can take the form of a kind of repetition and geometry of shifting viewpoints that often create an alienating reading experience, occasionally doubled by literal physical violence as if it were the culmination of the strange reading effect of spatial repetition. Indeed, in a short and incidental 2018 text, McCarthy begins by stating that “death is a question of geometry.” He goes on to discuss the forensic practice of drawing outlines not only around the body but also around any object in its immediate proximity, a practice that will show up in his 2005 novel Remainder to great effect. In doing so, he asks us to consider the possibility that the geometry of this procedure always already exists—that is, that the trace of violence is always there, so to speak, even before the occurrence of the act: “what if the forensic overlay, its lines, sectors, segments, angles, intervals, were there already, prior to the fatal event (not overlay but underlay)?”