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.’ ( )