Slaughtermatic

Set in the blood-drenched chaos of Beerlight, "a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism," Dante Cubit and his pill-popping sidekick, the Entropy Kid, waltz into First National Bank with some serious attitude and a couple of snub guns. Murderous, trigger-happy cops, led by the doughnut-chomping redneck police chief, arrive in force, firing indiscriminately into the crowd gathered outside. Surrender or capture is out of the question. Dante's beloved, the murderous assassin Rosa Control--packing a not-so-small arsenal--prowls the streets, trying to engineer her man's escape. Will Dante slip past the forces of corruption and disorder to join his Rosa? What happens next is a tangled mess of reality and virtual reality.

Amazon.com Review

Steve Aylett's Slaughtermatic is enacted in a parodic, cyberpunk world in which crime has become an individualistic and self-evolutionary art. Dante, the protagonist, plans to rob a bank with the help of Download Jones, a human meat puppet whose personality is live on the Net, and Kid Entropy, whose Kafkacell weapon bonds with his psyche to produce a suicide-wannabe who can only kill others. With the vault scan code in his pocket, Dante is duplicated in a time shift that puts him virtually ahead of the actual event--and able to enter the vault undetected. His crime and the action-filled plot become complicated when his second self, Dante Two, refuses to sacrifice himself as planned, murderous Brute Parker is set on Dante's trail, and Rosa Control takes matters into her own razor-bladed hands. Into the melee steps Eddie Gamete, the presumed-dead postmodern prankster-philosopher, Dante's only hero and the author of The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel, a book no reader can survive. Expectations about what and who is real change like television channels in Dante's world, where fates much worse than death await.

From Booklist

Aylett draws on sf and crime-fiction conventions in an experimental novel about a future when life is so cheap that crime is a form of recreation. Dante Cubit, more of a conceit than a character, holds up a bank, making allusions to detective stories all the while and engagingly slipping back in time 15 minutes when a guard sounds the alarm. Dante is dead, but by going back in time, he lives again in a slightly different reality. Once more the robbery goes sour because of the faulty virtual-reality model Dante studied, which leaves him trapped in the bank building when the escape route he memorized turns out not to be there. Later, Dante finds himself in a mall with his sidekick, the Entropy Kid, wondering whether they have been arrested. Other characters include gun moll Rosa Control, pulled in for questioning by the philosophical cops. A mockery of a novel, appealing to postmodern sensibilities more than to the general reader per se. John Mort

From Kirkus Reviews

Even if Britisher Aylett doesn't use William Burroughs's ruse of cutting pages lengthwise and joining mismatched halves, his first book to be published here remains a baffling exercise in virtual reality storytelling, nearly as hallucinatory as Burroughs' work. Dante Cubit and the Entropy Kid rob a bank for which digital prankster Download Jones sold them the virtual-reality schematic so that they could plan every move. But Download's schematic simulation turns out to be for the wrong building, as Dante and the Kid find out in the middle of their hold-up. Using an altered keychip (card swiper), Dante throws himself 20 minutes into the past and into the bank's vault. When Dante Two comes out of the vault, Dante One blows him away and so leaves ``himself'' (or his time-clone) behind as legally dead and Dante One thus beyond the law. Meanwhile, a contagion of squad cars bearing the bumbling racists Chief Henry Blince and Benny the Trooper arrives; Blince likes to make the crime fit the punishment and carries a Colt Demographic with a nine-inch barrel that can be set for age, color, and wage bracket. Dante wonders whether the heist has actually happened or just been portrayed or simulated in a sim crime environment. Should he and the Kid already be prisoners, Danny knows that a VR hive jail ``ran the same twenty-four hours on a loop and that there was a burst of static at the reset. Anyone killed was resurrected. Anything damaged was restored. Like a kid's game.'' But then Dante Two returns, and. . . . With brains reeling, many VR junkies will offer plea bargains to avoid fizzing incoherently into the floormatter. Droll, convoluted gamesmanship. (First serial to Bomb Magazine & New York Press) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover

Full of sass and sarcasm, ultra-cool Dante Cubit and his pill-popping sidekick, the Entropy Kid, waltz into First National with some serious attitude and a couple of snub guns. Within minutes, another (timetraveling) Dante appears - inside the bank vault - and the heist is on. But something's not right. Is it all just a virtual reality prank of Dante's hacker pal, Download Jones? Have Dante and the Kid really heisted the bank? What follows is a tangle of reality and virtual reality. Adding to the fireworks is the very real hitman Brute Parker, hot on the trail and out to exterminate Dante - or is it Dante Two - his rival for the love of the captivating assassin Rosa Control.

About the Author

Born in 1967, Englishman Steve Aylett lives outside London. Slaughtermatic is his first book to be published in the United States.

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