From Amazon.com
Smartass slacker satirist Steve Aylett follows up his debut novel,
Slaughtermatic, with
Toxicology, an equally scathing collection of 20 short (often short-short) stories, eight original and 12 reprinted (mostly from British publications like
TechnoPagan,
Crime Time, and
Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll). Some of the stories share settings and characters with
Slaughtermatic. All the stories are bursts of ferocious energy, fast and furious as punk-rock songs and about as subtle. The plotting is not complex (sometimes it's little more than the setup for an O. Henry twist), but the ideas are clever, the anger is justified, the prose is imaginative, and the dialogue is sharp (though the hard-boiled metaphors are occasionally overcooked to incomprehensibility).
Toxicology is a potent, poisonous, post-cyberpunk cocktail of ultraviolence and outrage with a splash of Burroughs, a dash of Ballard, and a twist of Dick.
Three quick tastes: In "Gigantic," the media turns an astrophysicist forewarned of alien invasion into just another crackpot tabloid-TV guest. In "Tail," a hyper-Chandlerian PI follows a suspicious fiancé through a surreal cityscape. And in "The Passenger," a musician attempts to make his unknown band famous via a performance-art plane crash. --Cynthia Ward
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Featuring some stories set in Beerlight, this is an awe-inspiring, mind scrambling collection of fiction from one of the UK's most exciting new writers. Aylett has been feted by Michael Moorcock, The Face, iD, The Standard, The Independent, The Guardian, SFX and Starburst. With these stories it is easy to see why. Steve Aylett's is a unique imagination. This UK edition includes new stories not included in the US edition.
