You never really forget the first time a book blows your mind, especially when it occurs multiple times during the same reading session. I'd underestimeted the text, thinking from the cover summary that it was going to be another semi-entertaing slice of infodumps and that special thing that sf - and all good fiction - does where the image of 'the real' presented is tweaked ever so slightly - which I happen to like; a paper lens through which to sort the contents of the text and compare them with the remembered contents of the real in my mind, drawn-in to the play of ideas through words, something like that. (Don't ask me about non-fiction. Not yet.)
Then I read the first three sentences:
Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to killa a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincusion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a a graffitti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubber.
...a few days later, after I'd read through this dazzling, literate, hyperkinetic, punk-flavored bricolged explosion, Slaughtermatic went from 'this weird book I'm reading right now' to 'the book everyone should be reading right now, it's important'. This was long before I'd moved to Baltimore, which is where, under the moniker Beerlight, several of Aylett's novels are set.
Slaughtermatic is drenched in all the slippery advancements of the 20th century (Anglophone-stylee, sorry) - Dada and Surrealism and Borges and Cortázar and Burroughs and Acker, shot through with arcane pronouncements and prophetic non-sequiturs, Time crimesand guns that shoot philosophy. A weirder, better and more compelling read than anyone's ever deserved, unparalleled in its successfully being as individual and funny and upsetting a work as one could find nowadays (or then-a-days, since the novel was published in the 90s).
Recommended for your Deleuze and Guattarri reading friends who seem humorless but like lasers.
