I just finished John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, which is set to be published by Harper Perennial at the end of the year. It is Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho meets The Player set amongst the Cool Britannia music scene of the late 1990’s.
While it was fun revisiting a lot of the music of that time that I enjoyed (like the Prodigy and Oasis), the book’s amoral main character, while often entertaining, is entirely loathsome. As the book progresses, his nihilistic banter eventually grates and becomes tedious. It strives for the transgressive, but pales when compared to authors who are masters of this milieu (like Irvine Welsh).
But all is not lost in galley land. Publishers Group West hooked me up with an uncorrected proof of Will Elliott’s The Pilo Family Circus, which is due in March of next year. This Australian novel takes that lovable tramp of culture, the circus clown, and turns him into a murderous psychopath and a surrogate for the evil that men do. In this novel, the protagonist is shanghaied into a troupe of circus clowns that perform in a circus that literally borders Hell.
I really enjoyed reading this book, which would be just as suitable in the horror section as it would be in literature next to Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. And the cool thing is that Dunn will pen an introduction for the novel’s American publication.
This book is being published by a relatively new publisher in Portland, Oregon called Underland Press. I’m a big believer in small publishers as a brand. Meaning that if you like one book a publisher puts out, you’ll probably like them all. It’s a hard trick to pull off, but between this and another galley of theirs that I have (Brian Evenson’s Last Days), it looks like Underland Press is batting a thousand in a vein mined by the likes of Night Shade Books.
After all of this death and nihilism, I needed something a bit more lighthearted, and A Pint of the Plain: How the Irish Pub Lost its Magic but Conquered the World by Bill Barich fits the bill (due in time for St. Patrick’s Day 2009). In search of a classic Irish pub (like he had seen in films like the Quiet Man), the author becomes disturbed to find that these traditional pubs are awfully hard to find (many having installed big screen televisions for sports fans, and offering more upscale pub grub), and when he does actually find them, they are actually carefully constructed simulacra of those ideal pubs of yesteryear.
I haven’t finished this yet, but so far, it is as delightful as a Guinness and a sausage roll on a misty spring afternoon.
