Once upon a time, while directing a small independent publishing house, I received a manuscript that, starting with its epigraph, announced itself as something very different and very funny:

“I think I’m hit.” – Baby Face Nelson, hit seventeen times by a .45 caliber Tommy gun

Such was my introduction to Slaughtermatic’s Beerlight, a world where “to kill a man was less a statement than a mannerism” (Aylett, Slaughtermatic p. xi ). Appearing as it did in the post-punk era of 1997, when New York was suddenly less about rock ‘n’ roll, riots, and drugs than real estate, when all things alternative withered under the deceptively bland, vampiric regime of the Clinton Administration – the novel was refreshing, a clarion call to the culturally defiant: violent, and violently funny; cynical, suffused with drugs and guns, and best of all, strictly speaking the plot didn’t make sense. It was itself a cultural weapon: it seemed to me as dangerous in real-life as The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel, the book which “nobody could read and live” (p. 47), the poisonous treasure hidden in a bank safe that provides the impetus for the sea of blood spilled in Slaughtermatic. In its wake, so much that was seen then as daring or edgy – the work of the Bret Easton Ellises, the T.C. Boyles and David Foster Wallaces – appeared tame, predictable and academic. I loved Slaughtermatic, and was certain it would shortly be found at the bedside table of every American.

The Crime Lord behind this mayhem was a young English writer hailing from the obscure London suburb of Bromley, unheralded by the intelligentsia, published by a UK house even smaller than the one that I ran. Steve Aylett resided then, as he still does, behind tinted glasses, and seemed to be permanently welded to a combination of a long black coat and a horizontally-striped shirt. A Beckett of psychedelia: a laconic jeweler of hitherto-unseen and unimagined phrases.

In Slaughtermatic, Aylett takes the pulp novel, a noir icon so time-worn that even the parodies have parodies, and amazingly, spectacularly, creates an original, readable, literary sci-fi amalgam. Genuine precedents? Shades of James M. Cain, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs do emerge in some passages, but throughout his book Aylett scatters, jewel-like, sentences and concepts never before encountered:

“Specter thought fondly of the days when he’d tear off the eyebrow of a witness and blow it towards the jury like the seed-head of a dandelion.” (p. 82).

•

“Corey pulled her Hitachi pistol and put the guy down with one shot. Right there was what she hated about this neighborhood.” (pp. 76-77)

•

“Blince aimed the bullhorn around a corner of the Malacoda hog tank. ‘Surrender now and I’ll forget I ever said this.’ ” (p. 147)

•

“Love sure burned a layer off your expectations. ‘He who fights and runs away,’ he thought, ramming through a roadblock, ‘than never to have loved at all.’ ” (p. 152 )

•

Aylett toys with cliché and idiom, and he toys with toying: and at the same time, with this total embrace of artifice, he touches on the real. Aylett imbibes storytelling and spits out something genuine.

We rely on evoking images of the familiar for quick transmittal. That’s true for the written vocabulary as well as the visual: we “read” words, pixels on a page, recognizing shapes of letters that form the words that form the phrases, the familiar combination that leads to an impression of understanding, and skim over details to what we think is actual meaning. Aylett understands and subverts our forgetfulness. In the course of doing so, he has opened up a new dimension of literature.

The heist launches the book. No explanation needed here. Shades of vintage Americana are immediately discernible: soulful, doomed hero Dante Cubit wields a Winchester shotgun (a nod to classic Westerns) but really wants to discuss economics or poetry; his equally morose sidekick the Entropy Kid, “almost amphibious with despair” (p. 3) pops pills and carries a “Kafkacell cannon gun” (p. 3) presided over by the Kid’s light trigger-finger. Their hostage the “perky” bank teller is another stock character, a gum-chewing moll from an Edward G. Robinson flick who fixates on the Kid. We now have been introduced to our alternative Hole-in-the-Wall gang, shortly augmented by one Download Jones, the techno mastermind who has supplied the plans of the bank building and vault, and Rosa Control – the black leather-clad love of Dante’s life, Cat Woman-like and irresistible, in every sense of that word.

Dante heads to the vault wherein lie the safe deposit boxes, one of which holds the aforementioned Impossible Plot by the mythic Eddie Gamete. A straightforward stickup? hardly. The bank vault’s “time lock” has been subverted by Jones, so that instead of throwing a thief twenty minutes into the future when the police have arrived, as it is supposed to, it throws Dante twenty minutes into the past – when he, now Dante Two, can appear on the bank floor to surprise the guards just before the stick-up occurs and Dante One arrives along with the Kid. It’s a bit complicated: but does Aylett shirk from such challenges? No, he makes it worse: to avoid confusion and the possible immolation of all Beerlight (it’s a physics thing) should Dante remain a multiplication of himself, Dante One shoots Dante Two in the stomach . . . and turns away, thinking he’s killed his doppelgänger (or is Dante One the doppelgänger?). As the foregoing implies: he hasn’t. More on that later.

Heading to the roof to make their getaway, the robbers find they’ve memorized the wrong building plans, and Dante One, undoubtedly the sort prone to depression under the sunniest of skies, slumps to the ground, suspecting his life is a fiction, that he is caught in a virtual feedback loop – that in reality, or “meat-time” his mind is being held in electronic purgatory, his body imprisoned by the authorities for various sins in a holding tank known as the Mall. Is the stick-up part of an endless, and therefore pointless, litany of slaughter? Has he, and by implication the reader, been fed a souped-up Shaggy Dog Story, another American trope incorporated by Aylett?

Re-reading Slaughtermatic, I am put in mind of the Irish critic and philosopher Denis Donoghue, who in Ferocious Alphabets quotes Plato quoting Socrates quoting an ancient legend concerning a mighty Egyptian king who is approached by a god, Thoth, known to us today primarily for sporting the head of a dog-faced baboon or, at times, an ibis. Ibis-headed or baboon-headed Thoth lays before the king a series of gifts, one more magnificent than the next. Finally, he presents the king his greatest gift: an invention he says is the key to furthering humanity's wisdom, its memory and therefore its understanding of the universe. The gift, of course, is writing. The king demurs: whether out of error or malice, Thoth has ascribed to letters “a power the opposite of what they really possess”(Donoghue p. 94). Writing contributes to confusion, to the gloss of understanding that leads to spiritual and physical mayhem; it is meaning’s doppelgänger diverting us from the true path. Thoth, now perhaps recognizable as a trickster (his Greek counterpart Hermes, god of thieves, poets, and commerce, has long been identified as such) does not respond.

Next on the scene: the brotherhood, Beerlight’s gang of officialdom otherwise known as “police,” roars up to the bank. Here Aylett introduces us to one of his most intriguing creations: Chief Harry Blince, brutal, powerful and fat, an unredeemable, joyously violent creature recalling Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles’ role in “Touch of Evil”). Abetted in his cruelties by his slightly less fearsome amanuensis Benny the Trooper, the jester to his mad king (and if the king is mad, the jester, at once partner and antidote to the regal, is at least somewhat sane), Blince, a doughnut devotee and firm believer in the virtues of pre-emptive strikes, promptly sets about mowing down the bank employees.

Rosa Control, concerned for her Dante's well-being, pays Download Jones a visit in his lair: it turns out that Benny and Blince are the ones caught in the virtual feedback loop; they've been captured by Jones and fed endless visions of violence and chaos. At this point, things get more than a little hazy.

The police burst in: they free their comrades-in-arms and nab Jones. Rosa makes a getaway. Blince and co. hurry off to the “real” bank job. Back at the brotherhood's den, Jones is interrogated but “volunteers nothing but fluids.” Of course, he retains several secrets: an explosive one buried in his body is relevant to this particular moment in the book.

Download was pounded to the floor. He moved his arm as though he’d the temerity to protect himself. In what form would his atonement come to fruition? They refused to tell him, feigning bafflement. A fist smashed into his jaw and, with a sound louder than a bomb, the building vaporized so fast a dozen bigots were left falsifying evidence in mid-air (Aylett p. 32).

Parse the above; it contains several of the elements that make Slaughtermatic an outstanding work. There is direct physical action: our man is dropped to the floor. We know something of him; he’s the one person identified by name in the interrogation – the others are “they,” faceless figures of authority – we can’t help but empathize with him, the hunted, the victim, the one human. There is tenderness, a delicate evocation of pain without crudely specifying its source ¬– Download Jones may be a criminal but he is no assassin, he’s a classic geek, and it makes sense he’d shield himself from violence. By the standards of Beerlight he should expect, perhaps even welcome suffering in the face of the brotherhood’s wrath; thus defending himself is courageous and unexpected. How can he ever pay for what he has done? But the police mock him, and continue the torture. Download’s self-destruct mechanism is set off. In martyrdom, the geek emerges triumphant. Throughout the novel, this combination of poetically expressed humanity and over-the-top violence lifts the prose out of the realm of gonzo/bizarro writing and into the sublime.

Outside the besieged bank, Blince encounters Officer Tredwell Garnishee, who exhibits slight and, to the chief, disturbing strains of lawfulness and sincerity. But his real sin, in Blince’s eyes, is in serving him inferior doughnuts: “You’re a waste of hair, Tredwell. You wouldn’t make an impression on a goddamn pillow" (p. 35). Blince fires him and proceeds to kill everything in and out of sight, making up for the fact that his previous slaughter of innocent bystanders took place only in virtual reality. Meanwhile, leaving Dante One behind – despite their entreaties, he listlessly refuses to join them – the Kid and Cory the Teller make their way to the roof of the bank building, where they flee by clinging to inflatable dictators that have been warehoused on a floor above the bank. Benny looks upward to witness their escape: “Eight Hitlers, three Napoleons and a Mao emerged and began floating upward like a soap bubble cluster. Suspended beneath them was the Entropy Kid and a cackling woman” (p. 40).

It transpires that Dante Two has survived his gut shot: he wanders Beerlight forlornly, bleeding and searching for Rosa. And poor cashiered Tredwell, never really off the case, has an unfortunate encounter with a bloodthirsty lawyer (perhaps Aylett’s only flirtation with cliché, but a well-placed one) and is shot. Propelled by duty alone, he staggers to the offices of the rent-a-hitman entrepreneur Hustler Meese. His last, selfless act is to engage the assassin Brute Parker to kill Dante: Tredwell believes that if the two Dantes meet in real-time the result will be a massive explosion laying waste to all of Beerlight.

But Dante Two survives even Parker’s expert and enthusiastic attempts at annihilation, and towards the end of the book the two Dantes do get together for a lively, non-violent verbal tussle (throughout which they are careful not to touch one another). They have an exchange which provides a clue that of the two Dantes, the “real” one, the one which retains the grim, vinegary essence of the original, is Dante Two – despite the fact he’s a replication. By copying himself, Dante One has become a sunnier, lamer iteration, the dregs: the proof is that he prefers a trashy 1992 remake (starring Drew Barrymore) of the 1950 film “Gun Crazy” (directed by Joseph H. Lewis) which Dante Two disdains, preferring the decidedly noir original.

Much is blown up in Slaughtermatic, but it would be a mistake to think this anarchy for anarchy’s sake: it is constructive destruction. In the wake of Aylett’s verbal demolition, an alien, delicate structure emerges. The preposterous names, the outrageous and cartoon-like antics of Beerlight’s denizens lie like a mask over Aylett’s refinement and precision. This is a book about a book, a book about lovers of books and love – Dante and Rosa are the star-crossed couple essential to any gunslingers’ tale – an ode to all that is noir.

---

Works Cited

Aylett, Steve. Slaughtermatic. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997

Donoghue, Denis. Ferocious Alphabets. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984