W.'s expansive study of texts and images that he identifies with the ‘Neronian grotesque’ adopts a plus quam approach, similar to the theme of excess that occupies the final third of the work. This approach depends upon capacious definitions of both ‘Neronian’ and ‘grotesque’. Features identified with the ‘grotesque’ are not limited to the period of Nero's principate (54–68 ce), so neither are W.'s examples. Similarly, the ‘grotesque’ is a ‘polyvalent concept’ that includes multiple phenomena decipherable in Neronian literature and visual culture, from ‘the estranged worldview of Seneca and Lucan to the carnivalesque absurdity of Petronius and Persius’ (pp. 1, 5). In adopting spacious parameters for the material under study, W. attempts to identify and examine a particular aesthetic while also building an awareness of its precursors and successors.

The work is divided into three themes: ‘Fantasy and Reality’, ‘Hybridity’ and ‘Ornament’. Each theme groups textual and visual evidence as part of wide-ranging discussions. Within the chapters, items are described in depth; this is especially helpful for the visual evidence, as many of the reproductions are of poor quality. W.'s analyses are carefully executed and shine most brightly when he illuminates the manifold meanings of understudied texts. By considering the reader's experience of a text within a particular visual culture, or imagining a viewer's experience of specific visual moments, W. emphasises that the grotesque authorises the reader/viewer to generate meaning, even in the midst of disorientation and disorder.

Part 1 explores fantasy and reality. The first chapter lays important groundwork for understanding the concept of the ‘grotesque’ from the first century through its long history across time and space, before returning to the Neronian period as expressing a potential cultural Zeitgeist. We enter the Domus Aurea along with Renaissance explorers and follow various theorists of the grotesque in order to understand its various conceptions; Ruskin is especially helpful for W. in the identification of the ‘paradoxical nature of the grotesque to amuse and terrify’ (p. 16). In the second chapter fantasy and reality are collapsed and their boundaries blurred in a study of three Neronian spaces. Seneca's tale of Hostius Quadra's house of mirrors in the Naturales quaestiones, the peristyle of the Casa dei Dioscuri in Pompeii, and the ecphrasis of the hidden grove of Seneca's Thyestes are read in conversation with F. Connolly's idea of Spielraum (‘room to play’); these spaces create senses of disorientation, transgression and distortion, for they depict worlds that do not operate as they should, and make us question the world we inhabit. W. excels in his analysis of the Hostius Quadra episode and is at his most innovative in his examination of the Medea panel in the Casa dei Dioscuri. The introspective, psychological realism of Medea becomes part of a visual programme that includes Perseus freeing Andromeda and tripods featuring the Niobids. As Medea considers filicide, the children of Niobe are slain in an image that celebrates the fantasy of the grotesque. There is space for further consideration of myth versus reality as well as generic expectations and confrontations in each of these examples.

Part 2 addresses hybridity as a fundamental aspect of the grotesque, separating the concept into chapters on the experiences of fear and laughter. Confronted with hybridity, readers/viewers might experience shock and intrigue, awe and fear, and be disturbed by what they see or read, or recognise the playful or satirical aspects of hybrids; emotions and experiences so carefully separated into different chapters emerge as wholly interdependent, and it is difficult to determine what affect is intended. The Domus Aurea provides an obvious starting point; its images combining human, animal and vegetal forms are reviewed as a highlight of this aesthetic: Vitruvius’ De architectura and Horace's Ars poetica offer responses. The chapter is weakened by its repetitiveness; this is a common fault of W.'s introductions and conclusions. Nevertheless, Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogue 7, placed in conversation with Room 129 of the Domus Aurea, offers fruitful insight into the idea of wonder that goes beyond fear. There is a danger of over-reading in Room 129: W. argues, ‘Each T-panel acts as a semantic unit, expressed over and over again, to impart the message that these creatures, however wild they may appear, belong to a system entirely under imperial control’ (p. 79). This idea leaves room for growth: what does imperial control look like in the context of the grotesque and in the broader cultural context of Neronian Rome? Lucan's Erichtho is both frightening and ridiculous, and provides a bridge to the chapter on laughter, which considers Persius, Pompeiian wall paintings and Petronius’ Satyrica. This includes a deeper dive into the social context of Petronius, although W.'s focus on bodies omits considerations on the hybrid nature of the text itself.

Part 3 turns to ornament, with chapters on ‘Cosmos and Chaos’ and ‘Excess’. In both chapters W. establishes how both visual and textual evidence can disrupt expectations and disorient a viewer or reader, leaving one questioning the boundaries of representation, if indeed they exist. Quintilian provides a starting point, while the visual programme of the Casa dell'Ara Massima in Pompeii constructs a viewing experience on a smaller, domestic scale that is expanded in the analysis of the Domus Aurea in the following chapter. Chapter 6, ‘Excess’, is the culmination of the study, and considers what W. terms the ‘plus quam aesthetic’ in Seneca, Lucan and the Aetna, concluding with Room 119 of the Domus Aurea. The Aetna analysis has a type of circular logic interrogating the definitions of both ‘Neronian’ and ‘grotesque’, bringing readers back to the opening discussion. We then return to the Domus Aurea in a satisfying ring structure that reminds us of how far we have come. The conclusions reiterate a conceptualisation of the ‘grotesque’ that is disparate, pervasive, diffuse and diverse.

The concept of the ‘grotesque’ is not new, especially in the study of Neronian authors, but elements of ancient visual and textual evidence are rarely juxtaposed with the type of force W. applies. This book is thus well-situated within the series Image, Text, and Culture in Classical Antiquity and pushes scholarship in new directions by comparing aesthetics and style across visual and literary texts and contexts. As W. admits, the argument ‘appeals to the “fuzzier echoes” of interactivity between visual and literary culture’ (p. 5); as such, W.'s main intervention in scholarship and the strength of his work is the accumulation of a wide variety of evidence and the consistent consideration of the reader/viewer's experience. Like the objects and texts under study, readers/viewers become ‘participants in this collective mode of display’ (p. 197) and are encouraged to see the grotesque where others have not.

W.'s work reflects its subject matter by bringing together a seemingly disparate set of textual and visual moments inviting an aesthetic response that is often ‘both unsettling and pleasurable’, not unlike viewers in the Casa dell'Ara Massima (p. 159). On page 1 readers are confronted with the discomforting image of semen coming out of an eyeball, an oddity presented by the satirist Persius, and immediately swivelled to Nero's Domus Aurea and the wall paintings that gave rise to the term ‘grotesque’. This type of disorientation is characteristic of the work and prompts further dialogue between image, text and reader/viewer. As W. concludes, ‘The grotesque afforded Neronian artists and authors new avenues for perceiving the world and representing it’ (p. 6). In The Neronian Grotesque W. affords us the same.