“I aim to startle as well as please,” Muriel Spark once said, and in The Driver’s Seat (1970), her aim is all too true. Her most unnerving novel, this is a book to make the flesh creep. With fierce economy Spark focuses on her terrifying heroine Lise, who leaves her home in northern Europe for a southern holiday, apparently on the prowl for a lover: “If he’s my type,” she says, “I want to meet him.” But of course appearances aren’t everything. Pity and fear attend Lise’s final day. Superbly chilling, blithely evil, Lise takes the reader on a drive to Hell.