This is a group of interconnected short stories that introduce the denizens of a town called Beerlight. 'Tis a very strange place.

Tony Endless had gotten a job working for a local pest exterminator. On his first job, he took out the firearms carried by everyone in Beerlight and wiped out the dog, cat and aquarium in the house, not realizing that they were ot the pests in question. Word got around town, and now Tony has a business breaking into houses at night, quietly removing pets that the owners want gone, and, just as quietly, giving them to owners that do want them.

Ben Stalkeye and chance don't go together very well. The strangest and most unlikely things would happen, only on the condition that he didn't want them to happen. This presented problems for his criminal career. Joe Solitary loved the feeling that came from being the subject of false accusation and did everything possible to be arrested and jailed for crimes in which he was not involved at all. He would go to the police station all the time and confess to anything and everything.

In a place where paranoia is a part of daily life, Carl Overchoke had gone back for seconds and thirds. One day, he is told that "they" are on to him. Carl is an average guy who suddenly feels very important. He starts acting more self-assured, almost like a big shot, seeing spies everywhere, and eventually does gain the notice of the police. Jesse downtime didn't know how to rob anyone, so he experimented with smaller and smaller thefts. He tore the stalk from an apple at the local deli. He broke into the state zoo at night to steal an ant, then return it to the authorities. He would bump into people on the street, acquiring dozens of their atoms without suspicion. After his release, his thievery was refined to such a point that it occurred only in his mind(...)

I enjoyed the stories in Crime Studio b/c of Aylett's flip and hilarious prose. Lots of surprisingly funny bits contained, and Brute Parker has become one of my favorite fiction characters.

Brilliant imagery and wonderful insights but did not go anywhere-loosely compare it to Tarentino's Pulp Fiction....a series of really cool images, but not much of a storyteller

Steve Aylett, Bigot Hall (Serif, 1995)

I spent the first few pages of this book alternating between offense and amusement. After a while, it hit me that I hadn't laughed out loud this many times per page at any book in quite a while, so I dropped the offense.

Imagine In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash (the book that inspired the classic film A Christmas Story) jacked up on PCP and going on a crime spree and you have Bigot Hall, Steve Aylett's impressionist biography of hands down the most interesting family in all of literature. The narrator, a nameless adolescent called "laughing boy" by friends and family alike, turns his jaundiced eye upon most every family member and lodger at the family's country estate, a living (or at the very least highly unstable, from a dimensional perspective) mansion known as Bigot Hall. Amidst the witty repartee (and this would make a good handbook for those who like to find stultifyingly obtuse .sig files) these rather twisted characters come to life quite nicely, to the point where one can almost believe some of the book's most outrageous moments. I won't spoil them for you, you'll have to read it yourself, but let's just say Aylett pulled off a pretty nice chunk of real estate in making the Verger's predicament seem not only plausible, but completely in line with the rest of the doings about him.

As with all books of the "selected glimpses of life" genre, there's no plot here, so the book must rely on nothing but character development to succeed, and it does so quite nicely. It's also choke-on-your-manacles funny from beginning to end. ****

I laughed out loud many times when reading this. I became a huge Steve Aylett fan after reading Slaughtermatic and this collection of stories certainly doesn't disappoint. The episodes with Roger Lang and in general anytime Snap and the Verger get together are hilarious.

Aylett encounters the same obstacles a Burroughs or Ballard did: if you're pushing the envelope, you're bound to confound dullards.... I guarantee you've never read work like this: and if you don't prejudge it, you WILL find it hilarious. Evelyn Waugh for the 21st century. A souped-up Bruce Sterling. Yum. Worth a few bucks for the ride.

True, if you're looking for Isaac Asimov, this won't be your bag. But if you're openminded... Aylett is a raucous, un-pigeonholeable wildman whose work is amazingly funny. An in-your-face series of rants and bizarre fantasies. I don't see how anyone can read "If Armstrong Was Interesting" without laughing out loud: I read a passage to some friends on the street and we could barely walk we laughed so hard.

True, if you're looking for Isaac Asimov, this won't be your bag. But if you're openminded...Aylett is a raucous, un-pigeonholeable wildman whose work is amazingly funny. An in-your-face series of rants and bizarre fantasies. I don't see how anyone can read "If Armstrong Was Interesting" without laughing out loud: I read a passage to some friends on the street and we could barely walk we laughed so hard.

If by "mind blowing" other reviewers meant that this book will make your brain want to spew chunks because it is so bad, then yes. It is mind blowing.

There is nothing unearthly, mystical, or genius about this little book. It is a collection of posturings and pseudo-poetic drivel.

There is no great imagery or prose in it. Just self-conscious phrases attempting to sound cool by being nearly completely obscure.

The book isn't worth the calories wasted by the act of picking it up.

If you like to have intense visualizations when you read books, this book is great. At times this book reads like one giant metaphor, but it is impressive and entertaining. The orginality and creativity factor used in the writing is really high. If you like Jeff Noon, Chuck Palahniuk, and the Matrix, definitely check this book out. You'l read it, tell soemone you just got your mind blown away, tell all of your friends about it, and then read it again. Get it.

In this mind blowing novel, Alix, a metaphysical assassin tells us about his attempt to kill God. Alix, his allies, and his opponents are all capable of moving etherealy through time and space, and this makes for some interesting action. Aylett's prose is eloquent but stripped down, so it is occasionaly hard to see what he's saying, but worth the effort. Aylett draws on a number of scientific, philosophical and spiritual traditions to create this world, and the questions that this book ispires are deep ones. The book is short and the print is large so this is a quick read. If you like books that deal with the metaphysical in an unusual way, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Old Bill Lee would be proud o' Mister Aylett. This book comes ripping at you hard and fast. Like Noon's Vurt? This thing makes Vurt seem like slow days in a Yurt. The characters are pasty and cardboard because the action is so angry and fast. No time to get to know anyone or need because they'll probably lose a leg or a head in the next scene. An angry work. The kind of read that makes you wish you were a film producer.

It's not for everyone...but I loved Slaughtermatic. I couldn't put it down, and convinced all of my friends to buy it, and most of them read it in one sitting also. It's like revenge of the Evil Toons in Toonland. It is almost impossible to describe Aylett's prose yet his imagination is something else. The weapons alone are worth the price of the book.

Having said that don't succumb to buying his other books. I found them insanely disappointing after having read this, the cream of the crop. Especially irritating is his non-linear plot in "The Inflatable Volunteer". Steve, you are capable of so much, why do you do this to us?

Read it, love it.

I hadn't read a novel in at least 5 years. I was browsing in a book store in San Francisco with some friends when I happened across Slaughtermatic. Before I returned to the streets I had read the entire thing- cover to cover. "How could someone write in such a fashion?" I thought to myself, "How could someone simultaneously fill me with joy, sorrow, fear, hope, laughter, tears, the urge to urinate, the need to become an elevator mechanic, the will to abandon my current belief system, the know-how to intelligently use the word 'and' in 5 or more idiomatically correct sentences, the love of bread, the loathing of hate, the dislike of bags, altruism, veneration, magnanimousness, the ability to occlude, hunger, thirst, lethargy, pain, free high quality hair cuts, bombastic speech patterns, the knowledge of my own name, the realization that I am not dead and don't want to be, exhaustion, dehydration, deadliness and skill?" I still haven't found the answer. It's been about a year since that fateful trip to the bookstore and I'm not the same. I see color now. Before I read Slaughtermatic I was confined to a wheelchair, now I walk. I recommend this book to any and all who are willing to undertake an adventure, to challenge their beliefs and to exhibit the courage to change themselves, no matter where they are in life. This donkey of a review is over.

I thought I was a pretty open-minded person a couple of years ago, but I either never was, or I have become less so in my older age. "Atom" by Steve Aylett really put my senses to the test, however.

This book, after just a few pages in, seems more like a joke on the reader than a novel. It almost reads like a Burroughs opium nightmare about a private eye, or a Gertrude Stein poem about one. There is no plot and even a nonlinear thinker will become lost amid the electron-induced battling plotlines.

I could be wrong, I hope I am, but I have a feeling that the people who loved this book and gave it excellent reviews were just not up to the task of admitting it didn't make much sense.

This wildly kinetic work of avant-garde sci-fi might be best described as "extreme improv writing" with loads of linguistic convolutions and pyrotechnics that are the end unto themselves. The story, such as it is, is populated by a P.I. and a bunch of outrageous gangsters racing to recover Kafka's stolen brain. Or at least, I think that's the gist of it... the wordplay moves so quickly and violently in building images up and tearing them down that it's hard to keep track of what's actually going on. Everyone speaks with over-the-top verbal tics and sarcasm. The imagery one gets is sort of a near future Maltese Falcon or Kiss Me Deadly but with decidedly odder weapons and setting. The inventiveness in language and imagery is truly impressive, check out my favourite passage: "Like most flux technology, the Syndication bomb hinged on a cheap but ingenious trick. Rather than actually stripping the subtext from the blast site, it converted the wave range into a living Updike novel, the subtext containing information everyone already knew--the end result was a shallow reality in which every move was a statement of the obvious." As this passage tells you, there are inside jokes by the barrelloads here, and if you don't get one, don't bother to re-read, because there's sure to be another on the next page. After a while, this hyperkinetic slapsticky style gets wearying, and the lack of story starts to show through. Still, worth checking out if you're looking for something unusual.

I found Atom truly original, laugh-out loud funny: my prediction is that Aylett will come to be recognized as one of the most interesting writers of our day. Aylett does things with the language I've never before encountered: this novel is a riotous take on Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, although anyone who's not open to an EXTREMELY raucous, funny and bizarre viewpoint need not apply. He's challenging, but not in a ponderous way: no neat plot structure, no nice, logical development...but WELL worth your money. None of the same old, same old here.