Steve AylettRezensionen

American hero comic book character, comprised of short stories, sometimes in two parts, including his origins and alternate histories. My favourite character is Pneuman, the robot built by Strong's father, although only one short story is really dedicated to him, where he questions his actions to fulfil his promise to prevent Strong from suffering (Book Five). Promethea also makes a short appearance in Book Four.

Wow...let me try to collect my thoughts. I was quite close to giving this 4 stars, or 2. This is a biography of a fictional writer. One of those fringe experimental types.
Take every parody you've ever seen of the kind of people who make one man shows, or do performance art. Mix in William S. Burroughs using his cut-up technique, a dash of Lovecraft, add a sprinkling of Andy Kaufman, maybe a touch of Alan Moore, Hunter S. Thompson or Michael Moorcock during his Jerry Cornelius writings. Oh and pour in some of Frank from the film 'Frank'.

So to try to find the point i lost somewhere above. This is a biography about a guy that writes complete bollocks. I mean it is the worst kind of 60's experimental garbage. Its a very well told bio, and is best when it interweaves with the real world.

The problem is that all the quotes from Lint are such nonsense, somehow even the fact that this is a satire doesn't lessen their annoyance... and yet and yet. After about a third of the way through i actually found some of the nonsense making sense. I can't tell whether the author was getting less obtuse or the text actually rewired my brain.

It helps that tv and film are mixed in, did you know Lint wrote an used script for the Star-Trek animated show? He didn't because he's fictional but still .

By the end i think i'm adding this to my reread list if only to see if the first third is still as annoying. If you've ever read any surreal or really artistic or experimental fiction, or experienced that kind of stuff in film, music or theatre then you might get a kick out this.
Or you might want to hunt down the author and club them to death with an imaginary wedge, or maybe both .

I think this might be the least insightful review i've ever written :lol.

Lea and Dan recommended this. A strange collection of very short stories about an imaginary town called Beerlight and its colorful characters. Great character names, and the police chief is hilarious because he keeps eating the evidence: donuts, pizza, etc. My favorite story was Like Hell You Are, where the main character John Stoop was so unremarkable that nobody could remember who he is. My biggest question is how did Steve Aylett know when this book was finished. 3.75 stars.

what. the. fuck.

I have no idea what to think of this book. in part it was the funniest thing I've ever read, at other points it was completely baffling bollocks.

confusing, hilarious and incomprehensible.

Absurdist fictional biography of an Asimovian Pulp writer without the talent.

The surrealist and intentionally underground tone of the book reminds me of Derek and Clive. And the 10th chapter *Catty and the Major* features a horrifying children's cartoon shared on recycled VHS by aficionados as with D&C.

Lint's fractured book synopses read like Aylett's real-life bedside table fragments. Half formed ideas for implausible and impossible stories. Summaries that work as trailers, but not features (a hotel with each floor is located in a different year). Lines too good to leave in a notebook and needing a form to be released.

Bonkers. Stark raving bonkers. But also brilliant. From its opening epigraph to its closing acknowledgements, this fictional biography of science fiction “legend” Jeff Lint is a breathtaking tour-de-force. It traces Lint’s life from his birth in 1928 to his death in 1994. Typically, Lint’s death was immediately preceded by a near-death experience. He was that kind of guy.

Lint’s life, such as it was, really began when he sought to publish his first stories during the hey-day of pulp science fiction. Lint’s stories were beyond the edge of sensible. So much so that quoting from any of them would render this account senseless. And his periodic forays into other media — comics, film, even pop music — were equally bizarre and disastrous. It’s the kind of life you won’t struggle to remember.

Aylett’s attention to detail is astounding. There is a bibliography at the end that stretches to a hundred blissfully imagined publications. He provides pages of “Lint Quotations” with such memorable lines as, “When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.” And there is a comprehensive 11 page index. Did I mention it was bonkers?

The downside of all this inventiveness is that reading the book is exhausting. Even a few pages at a time. I kept wondering how exhausting it must have been for Steve Aylett to write. And why. Certainly he has created something utterly unique. We can only hope it remains that way.

Cautiously recommended to those who either already are bonkers, or are hoping to go there.½

Creative collection of genre I wasn't familiar with called BIZARRO. Some very good, funny stories, some not as good - others seemed "weird" just for the sake of being weird. It is a STARTER KIT, so good for me as an introduction. Good place to discover Bizarro authors if you are interested. I will follow up on a few of the authors like Jeremy C. Shipp and Andersen Prunty.

Mildly amusing but goes on too long in the same vein. Might have been better as a short.

If you're going to write a book banging on about the importance of originality in thought and expression, you'd better make sure it's written in a really god-damn original way. And Steve Aylett's prose is, right enough, so original that after a few pages many readers may be forgiven for thinking that that's quite enough originality for one day, thanks. Like Nabokov, but to an infinitely greater degree, Aylett creates sentences so utterly stripped of banalities and stock phrases that they almost repel: it's not so much that he is not at home to Mr Cliché, but rather that he's waiting behind the front door to garrotte Mr Cliché and bury him under the back patio. You fly over his craggy paragraphs exhausted, searching desperately for somewhere smooth enough to land. Quite often, you end up travelling somewhere else by mistake.

I said earlier that readers might be forgiven for finding it all too much, but then I am a more tolerant person than Steve Aylett, who himself shows no sympathy whatsoever for those content to recycle other people's ideas, or to consume the results with bland satisfaction. ‘While many claim to crave originality,’ he says, ‘they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it.’ But though he acknowledges the revulsion, he obviously thinks we should all be doing more to get over it, instead of just buying further paperbacks from writers who ‘have as much artistic ambition as a fossilized spud’.

Part of the fun of this book is seeing him get specific about this, as when he suddenly launches an unexpected attack on other writers:

In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn't know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn't feel bad about filling it.

Even better are the pithy throwaways.

Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK.

These things are thrown out mid-paragraph, like a knives lobbed into a crowd by a horribly committed dadaist. In the end, surveying the range of lifts, borrowings and imitations in most artistic creation, Aylett concludes with magisterial derision: ‘It's pathetic to have someone else's gut feeling.’

True originality, by contrast, ‘increases the options, not merely the products’. He does touch on a few writers that he seems to admire (Tove Jansson, Greg Egan and – bafflingly to me – Michael Moorcock are all mentioned with approbation), and enjoins readers to ‘be ravenous’ in order to dig out their own gems. ‘Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness,’ he suggests, and for him this begins at the level of individual word choice, which gets an attention that I found particularly gratifying.

Words have the device-like detailed architecture of diatoms, and a glowing soul. A word will present itself as armatured with potential, as though with arms open, calling via your intuition to another word in another environment. You can enrich the stuff of life by bringing together two words which have never, ever been introduced to one another before. Perhaps because they dwell in different contexts or in the jargon of different disciplines, they are never held in the attention at the same time. Yet when put together, their cogs mesh as if they were made for each other and a massive amount of energy is released.

Any Aylett sentence will provide examples of such unexpected and productive collocations – as, for instance, when he describes Antonin Artaud as having ‘a face like a wet kestrel’, or when he writes that ‘A system is never so good that it couldn't be improved by a hen on a rampage’. In fact one of the surprises of Heart of the Original is just how practical some of the advice in here is, despite its quasi-parodic clothing. I loved this:

I was doing a story about a childhood visit to the circus and wrote ‘They pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a fourth beat the bejesus out of me.’ I found this mistake of the missing third clown very funny but didn't know why. When the mind has to jump a gap, the spark it fires can tickle the brain's surface or ignite unused pathways, depending on the guidelines placed on either side.

The book is itself a demonstration of the technique, compressed and elided at times to the point of incomprehensibility but frequently exhilarating anyway. He refers in passing, for instance, to Jesus' ‘suicide-by-cop’, or writes of creative expression that ‘It leaves you raw enough to feel your reflection granulate across a mirror's surface’.

Somewhere beyond the literary ectopia characterising Aylett's writing, there is – perhaps surprisingly – a core of real emotion and belief which in lazy shorthand you might call political. In this book, it's especially exhilarating because it's not just about other artists and how they should be assessed, it's also about how you can think and feel and react more creatively yourself. The consequences of this go beyond the world of the arts and soak into almost everything else. As Aylett cautions, ‘You may even live a life with repercussions.’

Describing Steve Aylett’s wild ride Atom is a lot like holding water in your hands. The thought stays with you for a mere moment until it just runs through your fingers. You remember the experience vividly, but are unable to accurately explain the sensation.

Three figures emerged from Atom’s brownstone. A cloaked cadaver cradling its gored face, followed by a naked Atom and the fat gent carrying a fishtank between them. In the tank’s gloom rocked a giant mouth with a tail.

Atom is Taffy Atom, private detective (or private defective as he is referred to early on). His partner is Madison “Maddy” Drowner, weapons designer (Creator of such unique weapons as the Syndication bomb, which strips the pretext out of everything.) and best friend Jed Helms, an intelligent piranha. With even stranger villains, Aylett’s world is Dick Tracy on acid. Like a runaway Maltese Falcon, the plot defies description. With only glimpses and moments of what we know and how it should be, it all somehow makes sense.

It is a testament to Aylett’s skill that he keeps the reader’s rapt attention throughout. His sense of humor is dead on, with several passages demanding to be read aloud. His timing is exemplary, and Aylett knows when to give the reader a breather. With all the excitement and laughter, I loathed for the adventure to end. Luckily for me (and other readers), the climax is oddly satisfying.

"Ladies and gentleman," said Atom, "if you'll indulge me. I have assigned a musical note to every grade of human lie. Here's my rendition of the President's inaugural address." And he took out a clarinet.

Aylett maintains the insanity right up until the last page playing a game of psychic chicken and refusing to swerve. Atom takes you on a wild ride far afield of ordinary fiction (SF or not), and it’s a ride not soon forgotten.

Trying to describe Steve Aylett’s wacky prose and wild adventures are like describing the wind on your face. And the imaginative Shamanspace is no different. God has been proven to exist and opposing groups of occult assassins compete to exterminate the supreme being. And it all gets weird from there. Complete with Aylett’s own illustrations and dynamic prose, Shamanspace is a fine novel from one of the freshest voices in fantastic fiction.

Welcome to Accomplice, population: deranged.

The setting for these slipstream novels is summed up efficiently enough in the third book:

Accomplice was a sun trap lidding an etheric mesh of connecting tunnels, the creepchannel. This toxic tissue formed a subterranean transit system for demons on their way to people's breakdowns.

That's as good an explanation as you're going to get, frankly.

Steve Aylett – the Bizarro Bard of Bromley – treats the English language like a roll of bubble-wrap, popping it apart in bursts of aesthetic pleasure and leaving it limp and drained. As with the first time I picked up The Naked Lunch, I spent a lot of time with Aylett wondering if I'd forgotten how to read. Since this is a reaction prompted both by great originality and by great incompetence, it takes a while to assess what you're dealing with, but I ended up convinced.

The fact I was laughing so much was the biggest clue. His writing kind of re-wires your brain: after putting one of his books down, everyone else's prose seems either bland, or unintentionally hilarious. I've already talked in punishing detail about his general technique in reviews of the individual books:

Only an Alligator
The Velocity Gospel
Dummyland
Karloff's Circus

These are definitely fated to remain a minority taste. But as the great Bingo Violaine said: ‘Consensus is reality with the crusts cut off.’

Who the FUCK has been hiding Steve Aylett from me for thirty-nine years. I want answers. What is this, a conspiracy of librarians? A booksellers' union grudge? This rebarbative but very funny novel takes the form of a biography of the pulp writer Jeff Lint – a sort of mash-up of Phillip K Dick, Robert E Howard and Alan Moore – and it is filled with more surprising word-collocations and startling throwaway ideas than anything I've read for months. From the opening, I was hooked:

Pulp science fiction author Jeff Lint has loomed large as an influence on my own work since I found a scarred copy of I Blame Ferns in a Charing Cross basement, an apparently baffled chef staring down from the cover. After that I hunted down all the Lint stuff I could find and became a connoisseur of the subtly varying blank stares of booksellers throughout the world.

Um…yes, I'll have two hundred pages of that, please. Across twenty-seven chapters – whose academic style soon dissolves into a kind of lysergic incomprehensibility – we learn the details of Lint's eventful career, including not just his fictional output (such as ‘the trash novel Sadly Disappointed about a child who is not possessed by the devil’), but also his forays into television in the form of a Star Trek script (in which ‘the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon’), his brush with Hollywood, his role as a New Mexican guru, and his work as a lyricist with a prog-rock band, penning such tracks as ‘DNA Interruption Charm’, ‘Through the Keyhole I Saw the Funeral of a Duck’ and ‘Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades’.

The tone is synaesthetic and off-kilter, but nevertheless in a tradition of British comic writing that feels familiar in the oddest places. Near the end of the book comes one of its best lines:

On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.

…which is pure Douglas Adams. But in other ways the voice is recognisably post-Chris Morris, except it's like all of Chris Morris's career concertinaed together, from the exact journalese of On The Hour (headlines mentioned in this book include WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT and the misprint-result OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW) through to the ambient, adrenal creepiness of Blue Jam, reflected here in the descriptions of Lint's terrifying cartoon series Catty and the Major.

Aylett's rococo non-sequiturs, and his tinges of weird fiction and body-horror, put him somewhere on the edge of the bizarro camp, except that unlike most bizarro authors Aylett can really write. Like Lint, he spends much of this book ‘rampaging through the English language like a buffalo’; at times his words seem like mere aesthetic objects, with no referents in the real world, and your eyes start to glaze over; but at others, they connect with a jolt. Again, a description of Lint's writing applies just as well to his creator's:

Every sentence expands in all directions at once and it becomes immersive to the point of hallucination. The story falls away into a heavy feverdream, a sort of constant metamorphosis parade. Ideas turn corners on themselves and thump axes in their own backs.

I found that you needed a run-up with the prose before you warmed up to it; then a certain cumulative effect kicked in, and every sentence became hilarious. But if I read too much, it overwhelmed me again. This is a book best consumed in medium doses.

I was in a strange place when I read Lint – working twenty-hour days and sleeping somewhere new every night. I would fall into bed at 1 a.m. with my alarm set for quarter to five, and read a few paragraphs of this before I passed out. In this drained, hypnotic state, I found that the gnomic pronouncements of Jeff Lint (‘Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety’) actually started to make a weird kind of sense. Worrying, perhaps. Part of me would like to see this talent reined in a little more by some formal discipline, but I will forgive a lot for a book that made me laugh out loud as often and as uncontrollably (like holding-in-giggles-during-school-assembly uncontrollable) as this one did. I emerged confused, but buffed into a creative hypersensitivity.

You can take these away with you:

● It was repeatedly rumoured that Lint's gonzo article ‘Mashed Drug Mutants’ had a subtext that was nothing to do with drugs, but Lint denied this.

● [during McCarthy's anti-Communist crackdowns] Lint was twitted the same year when three friends dressed as cops raided his apartment and found him forcing a bust of Lenin down the toilet.

● Lint had recently been hired to create a tourist slogan for the town, and came up with ‘Holiday parasites are welcome in a way, aren't they?’

● In response to astronomers' observations that the universe seemed to be rushing away from us, he remarked ‘Wouldn't you?’½

This is the third book I've read by Steve Aylett, the first two being (in order) Slaughtermatic and Gothic Hall. Both of these are personal favorites of mine, which I eagerly force upon unsuspecting friends and family whenever possible. Compared to these two, however, his newest novel Atom falls short.

Now, this isn't a bad book, not in the least. The basic premise is that of a retelling of The Maltese Falcon in the future-cyber-surreal city of Beerlight, except that the mysterious object everyone scrambles after is not a black statue, but Franz Kafka's brain. That alone should give you an idea of the lengths of madness traveled, and Aylett does so with his gifted ability to throw unforgettable one-liners and curt descriptions at you until you're bruised and bleeding and begging for more. For this the novel is not lacking.

My only real problem was the lack of depth achieved. The characters (including our hero, Taffy Atom) run around only half defined and barely memorable as individuals. And the storyline felt thrown together, as merely an excuse to throw around the players. That's not always a bad thing, mind you, but Aylett is capable of so much more, and has proven it in the past. Slaughtermatic (which was only 20 pages longer) not only felt real and drew you into the bizarre and complex storyline and characters, but he even succeeded in drawing out the individual personalities of two people who were essentially the same person!

So, as I said, I'm not saying this is a bad book. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it to others, although new readers of his may want to try the other two titles I mentioned first. It is simply not his best. But here's to hoping it is his worst.

Steve Aylett is one of those author's who are best recommended to others by merely pointing to his book repeatedly while nodding wide-eyed. Nothing you can possibly say can prepare someone for the twisted tales from Bigot Hall, although an easy attempt would be to describe it as The Addams Family, only darker, British, and considerably less polite. If you like black humor in a Gothic vein, mixed heavily with poetic pseudo-logic that makes your eyes bleed, than this is the book for you.

As Laughing Boy so eloquently states, "The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice."

Ah Lint, Jeff Lint.
I remember when I first came across a book of his as an impressionable teenager wandering the aisles of Galaxy Books in old Sydney-town. There it was, in the bargain bin, "I Eat Fog"; well-creased, a smattering of coffee stains, a purple, distorted, displeased mans' face. A collection of early short stories so strange as to flip your brain lobes, so pulpy as to rub your teeth gritty. Brilliant stuff, really.
I hunted down as much of his work as I could, every ratty flea-market stall, every brightly lit box-bookshop, the classics: One Less Bastard, Jelly Result, I Blame Ferns, Turn Me Into a Parrot, The Caterer, and many others...

I must say, I've been kicked out of more bars for arguments started over the merits of Lint's work than I care to admit. Now, finally, rather that punching some bloke for questioning Lint's sexual-orientation (so what if a man kits up in a dress and wig to deliver his manuscripts? It was the 60s for crimminy's sake!), I can just give them a copy of Ayletts' brilliant biography. Bravo, Mr. Aylett. Next round's on me.

Aylett proved he was a genius in Bigot Hall and I also enjoyed Slaughtermatic but this one was kinda dragged on for me. There are definitely plenty of amazing/hilarious lines but I lost the plot somewhere around page 12 and never got it back. There were a lot of characters and that didn't help. It was strange in the end it seemed like they were all in the same scene but I'm not sure how or why.

Anyway if you're into insanity, clever writing and nebulous plots, this is a fun noir romp.

As a sequel to 'Only an Alligator', this continues in the same absolutely crazy but brilliantly written way. I must confess it took me a couple of chapters to understand a word of what Aylett was saying, but once you slip into his mode of thinking and tip your mind at a tangent to our current dimension, it all begins to make sense. You realize that Aylett has not just created a strange world populated by slightly buffoon-like characters, but has beautifully crafted an entire dimension, where things work in other ways from what we are used to.

Incredibly imagined, lovingly crafted, and as a sequel, perfectly worthy, this book further explores the dizzying land of Accomplice.

This series will prove to be one of the most avant-garde of the generation, and doesn't just move fantasy to a new level, it invents a new carpark and supplies you with an extra piece of brain necessary to ride the creepchannel to this etheric infection.

Confused meets wildly entertained. Indulges, swings about the room. Finally exhausted, he regards the harsh light of day. Bored and ashamed.

This was absolutely excellent. I read Slaughtermatic and thought it was kind of over the top and incomprehensible way too often. But this was just smart and over the top.

It's hard to imagine exactly how he writes like this. It's like stream of consciousness (which is often boring or disjointed) but edited and cohesive. There are characters and each one stays "in character". You begin to know what to expect (even if it is the unexpected) and each is so interesting that it's hard to pick a favorite.

Each vignette is more absurd than the last but together they form a complete story. Some have interesting story seeds that could be the entire premise for a novel, others are just funny and mischievous.

Here's some dialogue, if you like this you'll love this book:

"You were referred to me by Mr. Roger Lang," said Father. "What can you say to redeem yourself?"

"I would like a room here."

"You and a million others. How old are you Mr. Mandible?"

"Thirty four."

"Correct. Do you heal quickly?"

"In a flash,. Unless the wound is open, as with a triangular chunk blade."

"Or a tubular coral injury," suggested Father, "sustained off the Hawaiian Islands."

"Precisely."

I've heard and read great things about Steve Aylett - but with this I appear to have picked the most difficult place to start ...
Downright weird, and devoid of any discernable plot or character, the book comes across as very much a stream, nay torrent of psychotic and psychedlic ramblings over a pint. The strangest thing though is that as it ferments in your mind, it briefly seems to make sense as a sort of dystopian noir novel.
Beautifully written - visceral yet humorous and I was pleasantly surprised to finish it!

I tried to like this book. I tried to read this book. I requested my library get it because I heard about it on NPR and it sounded hilarious. But I couldn't read it. It is boring, way too over-the-top, and if it's that over-the-top in the first chapter, where can it possibly go from there?½

Pretty fun and twisted - a nice, quick, violent, humourous read