Customer Reviews

Bigot Hall Pb

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Steve Aylett, Bigot Hall (Serif, 1995)

I spent the first few pages of this book alternating between offense and amusement. After a while, it hit me that I hadn't laughed out loud this many times per page at any book in quite a while, so I dropped the offense.

Imagine In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash (the book that inspired the classic film A Christmas Story) jacked up on PCP and going on a crime spree and you have Bigot Hall, Steve Aylett's impressionist biography of hands down the most interesting family in all of literature. The narrator, a nameless adolescent called "laughing boy" by friends and family alike, turns his jaundiced eye upon most every family member and lodger at the family's country estate, a living (or at the very least highly unstable, from a dimensional perspective) mansion known as Bigot Hall. Amidst the witty repartee (and this would make a good handbook for those who like to find stultifyingly obtuse .sig files) these rather twisted characters come to life quite nicely, to the point where one can almost believe some of the book's most outrageous moments. I won't spoil them for you, you'll have to read it yourself, but let's just say Aylett pulled off a pretty nice chunk of real estate in making the Verger's predicament seem not only plausible, but completely in line with the rest of the doings about him.

As with all books of the "selected glimpses of life" genre, there's no plot here, so the book must rely on nothing but character development to succeed, and it does so quite nicely. It's also choke-on-your-manacles funny from beginning to end. ****

If reading Borges, playing with the Mandelbrot set, and maiming mimes are three of your favorite passtimes, you may be so taken with this book that every other author starts to read like Jane Austen. Aylett's prose is a finely-crafted caustic, guaranteed to give purulent hives to every patch-elbowed realism Creative Writing workshop leader. Clever yet not unbelievably insipid. If every author less interesting than Steve Aylett was stacked like cordwood on the moon, Id be the last to ask questions.

Steve Aylett is one of those author's who are best recommended to others by merely pointing to his book repeatedly while nodding wide-eyed. Nothing you can possibly say can prepare someone for the twisted tales from Bigot Hall, although an easy attempt would be to describe it as The Addams Family, only darker, British, and considerably less polite. If you like black humor in a gothic vein, mixed heavily with poetic pseudo-logic that makes your eyes bleed, than this is the book for you.
As Laughing Boy so eloquently states, "The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice."

I laughed out loud many times when reading this. I became a huge Steve Aylett fan after reading Slaughtermatic and this collection of stories certainly doesn't disappoint. The episodes with Roger Lang and in general anytime Snap and the Verger get together are hilarious.

Bigot Hall is about a boy named Laughing Boy who doesn't laugh, and his insane family. They make the Adams Family look like the Beavers. They spend their time yelling at each other, attacking each other and plotting each others destruction. They also grow descendants in jars, scare the locals, play dead for days and have incestuous relations. There goes the neighborhood.

Steve Aylet is smart and funny and armed with a dangerously sharp wit. Every paragraph on every page has a chance of making you laugh or think or at least smirk. And you will do all that while reading Bigot Hall. You might also scratch your head a few times.

Bigot Hall might be too clever for it's own good. There is a lot to take in for a story with so little plot. I found myself having to reread certain sections trying to figure out what Aylett was saying. Other times I would catch a glimpse of meaning as it went sailing over my head.

Some of Bigot Hall is very good and it has it's share of laugh out loud moments. If you are looking for something bursting with cleverness and total absurdity then Bigot Hall is it. If you want something easier to read with a more compelling story then maybe it's not.

is excellent. Imagine Jean Shephard's childhood with the surrealistic slant of alien boarders, living dead relatives, incestuous daydreams. Yes, you will shoot your eye out.

This book will make you laugh, because it is very, very funny. I firmly believe this.

Brilliant imagery and wonderful insights but did not go anywhere-loosely compare it to Tarentino's Pulp Fiction....a series of really cool images, but not much of a storyteller