Bigot Hall [Paperback]

Steve Aylett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2002

Bigot Hall is the nightmare home of a family most people would rather forget. Uncle Burst's belief that his face is made of pasta is one of the milder notions with which he regales the family. Uncle Snapper is confined to a treehouse because of the uncontrollable urges he feels once is gun is loaded. Uncle Blute drowned in the lake at the wheel of his Morris Traveller, where he remains perfectly preserved. And Nanny Jack refuses all efforts to bury her and strikes terror into her relatives' hearts as she abandons yet another final resting place. Throughout this happy breed strolls a nameless anti-hero, who, when not kidnapped by clowns or puzzling out the fossilised family tree, is passionately in love with his spaced-out sister, Adrienne ...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Aylett is 36. He lives and works in Brighton. If he were any more English he'd be dead. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 153 pages
• Publisher: Serif Publishing; 1st Ed. edition (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1897959206
• ISBN-13: 978-1897959206
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,954,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As funny as choking on a toy poodle, April 23, 2001

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bigot Hall (Paperback)

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. ****

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An irony fractal mapped to the agony plane, March 7, 1999

By 

[e-mail] - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bigot Hall (Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We are all God's children... whether he likes it or not.", January 25, 2000

By 

S. Michael Wilson "A Strange Hero to a Select... (Phillipsburg, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bigot Hall (Paperback)

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."