Toxicology: Stories

Some stories in this new collection take place in Beerlight, the city of heroic criminals and villainous cops Steve Aylett introduced in Slaughtermatic. Others are set in unique worlds, creations of Aylett's twisted vision and sardonic sense of humor. "If Armstrong Was Interesting" is a series of scenarios imagining how the American hero might have jazzed up his voyage to the moon. In "Gigantic," corpses rain from the sky as payback for the massacres of our century.

Amazon.com Review

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

About the Author

Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967.

Reviews

News