Like a Tarantino movie written by Grant Morrison, Steve Aylett’s Slaughtermatic goes nowhere in a confusing and violent way. When I read Lint, Aylett’s biography of a non-existent SF author, I didn’t realize just how much of himself he had put into Lint. Jeff Lint is a master of absurd one-liners, and so is Aylett. You approach each sentence as if it were an undetonated bomb, (“the idea broke like a bone, hurting and useless”). Reading Slaughtermatic at normal speed is to miss the point. It will make your head hurt either way, but at quarter speed, and with repeated rereadings of unusually strange paragraphs, you may also enjoy it, though I offer no guarantees. A satire of hyper-violence, from a world of casual murder and philosopher criminals, Slaughtermatic makes about five aborted detours on every page, dropped into the story to derail the reader, (“Specter was an expert in fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other”). It’s hilarious, and proof that you can be absurd (“there were four dead guns on the floor, one still twitching”) without being obscure – which is why I now regret the comparison to Morrison, who is both.

[The cops] had escalated internal cover-ups after the crime strike embarassment four years ago – the only people conspicously unaware of the strike were the cops, who had gone on killing and looting as usual.