Abstract

'Savage talked about his life as a re-offender. How could someone be offended by the same thing twice? Was nothing learnt?'
Beerlight, the city of all of our futures, is not a safe place. Weaponry, rather than fast cars or designer clothes, is the ultimate status symbol. The populace is dedicated to law-breaking, politically incorrect views and hurling abuse and hand grenades at each other.
Combining elements of surrealism, film noir and punk rock ethos, Aylett creates a darkly comic landscape that's a cross between a Tarantino film and a Bosch painting, where murder is the ultimate expression of art.
The cast of hoodlums includes burglar extraordinaire Billy Panacea, conman-cum-lawyer Harpoon Specter and other fun-loving felons who hang out at the Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine Street reading the Parole Violators Bugle.
'Very funny and eminently readable'
Interzone
'Make no mistake, Aylett knows his stuff'
i-D
'Hilarious and horrifying dismemberment of the urban hardboiled style. Beerlight is a scary suburb located at the exact mid-point between then and now, between Mare Street and Main Street, where no-goods, no-hopers and ne'er-do-wells do not hesitate to pump each other full of holes or drugs. Practitioners of street mime are subject to particularly gruesome atrocitites. Comic-book imagery – like Jim Steranko on steroids – mingles with a noiriste's worst nightmare in this distressingly brilliant debut'
The Guardian