Slaughtermatic [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Steve Aylett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 1998

Set in the blood-drenched chaos of Beerlight, "a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism," Dante Cubit and his pill-popping sidekick, the Entropy Kid, waltz into First National Bank with some serious attitude and a couple of snub guns. Murderous, trigger-happy cops, led by the doughnut-chomping redneck police chief, arrive in force, firing indiscriminately into the crowd gathered outside. Surrender or capture is out of the question. Dante's beloved, the murderous assassin Rosa Control — packing a not-so-small arsenal — prowls the streets, trying to engineer her man's escape. Will Dante slip past the forces of corruption and disorder to join his Rosa? What happens next is a tangled mess of reality and virtual reality.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Steve Aylett's Slaughtermatic is enacted in a parodic, cyberpunk world in which crime has become an individualistic and self-evolutionary art. Dante, the protagonist, plans to rob a bank with the help of Download Jones, a human meat puppet whose personality is live on the Net, and Kid Entropy, whose Kafkacell weapon bonds with his psyche to produce a suicide-wannabe who can only kill others. With the vault scan code in his pocket, Dante is duplicated in a time shift that puts him virtually ahead of the actual event--and able to enter the vault undetected. His crime and the action-filled plot become complicated when his second self, Dante Two, refuses to sacrifice himself as planned, murderous Brute Parker is set on Dante's trail, and Rosa Control takes matters into her own razor-bladed hands. Into the melee steps Eddie Gamete, the presumed-dead postmodern prankster-philosopher, Dante's only hero and the author of The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel, a book no reader can survive. Expectations about what and who is real change like television channels in Dante's world, where fates much worse than death await.

From Booklist

Aylett draws on sf and crime-fiction conventions in an experimental novel about a future when life is so cheap that crime is a form of recreation. Dante Cubit, more of a conceit than a character, holds up a bank, making allusions to detective stories all the while and engagingly slipping back in time 15 minutes when a guard sounds the alarm. Dante is dead, but by going back in time, he lives again in a slightly different reality. Once more the robbery goes sour because of the faulty virtual-reality model Dante studied, which leaves him trapped in the bank building when the escape route he memorized turns out not to be there. Later, Dante finds himself in a mall with his sidekick, the Entropy Kid, wondering whether they have been arrested. Other characters include gun moll Rosa Control, pulled in for questioning by the philosophical cops. A mockery of a novel, appealing to postmodern sensibilities more than to the general reader per se. John Mort

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (April 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581033
• ASIN: B001G8WT0O
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,504,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aylett saved me, April 26, 2001

By 

A. O'Sullivan "Angie" (CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slaughtermatic (Paperback)

I hadn't read a novel in at least 5 years. I was browsing in a book store in San Francisco with some friends when I happened across Slaughtermatic. Before I returned to the streets I had read the entire thing- cover to cover. "How could someone write in such a fashion?" I thought to myself, "How could someone simultaneously fill me with joy, sorrow, fear, hope, laughter, tears, the urge to urinate, the need to become an elevator mechanic, the will to abandon my current belief system, the know-how to intelligently use the word 'and' in 5 or more idiomatically correct sentences, the love of bread, the loathing of hate, the dislike of bags, altruism, veneration, magnanimousness, the ability to occlude, hunger, thirst, lethargy, pain, free high quality hair cuts, bombastic speech patterns, the knowledge of my own name, the realization that I am not dead and don't want to be, exhaustion, dehydration, deadliness and skill?" I still haven't found the answer. It's been about a year since that fateful trip to the bookstore and I'm not the same. I see color now. Before I read Slaughtermatic I was confined to a wheelchair, now I walk. I recommend this book to any and all who are willing to undertake an adventure, to challenge their beliefs and to exhibit the courage to change themselves, no matter where they are in life. This donkey of a review is over.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Takes off where William S. Burroughs left off..., August 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Slaughtermatic (Paperback)

Old Bill Lee would be proud o' Mister Aylett. This book comes ripping at you hard and fast. Like Noon's Vurt? This thing makes Vurt seem like slow days in a Yurt. The characters are pasty and cardboard because the action is so angry and fast. No time to get to know anyone or need because they'll probably lose a leg or a head in the next scene. An angry work. The kind of read that makes you wish you were a film producer.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining and surreal, May 17, 2001

By 

David Sticher (Scotia, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slaughtermatic (Paperback)

Buñuel meets Tarantino meets Gibson in this ultraviolent, surreal mess of cyberpunk cliches. Coherency here is traded off for significant amounts of imagination and entertainment value, as well as a few sharp notions here and there; the result reads more like verse than prose, and your enjoyment of the material will vary directly with how much a psychotic, book-length, knee-deep-in-blood-and-shells poem appeals to you. It's not quite as deep as it thinks it is - or at least, it lacks the clarity to prove it - and the plot burbles into the background, but the energy and the verbal imagination never lets up. Recommended highly, but with reservations.