Customer Reviews

Slaughtermatic

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's not for everyone...but I loved Slaughtermatic. I couldn't put it down, and convinced all of my friends to buy it, and most of them read it in one sitting also. It's like revenge of the Evil Toons in Toonland. It is almost impossible to describe Aylett's prose yet his imagination is something else. The weapons alone are worth the price of the book.

Having said that don't succumb to buying his other books. I found them insanely disappointing after having read this, the cream of the crop. Especially irritating is his non-linear plot in "The Inflatable Volunteer". Steve, you are capable of so much, why do you do this to us?

Read it, love it.

I enjoyed reading this short book, but afterwards I had that guilty feeling I used to get after seeing a gory B movie.... It was fun, but I don't really want to admit to anyone that I enjoyed it.The story itself is a bit confusing and choppy, but there is enough entertainment on each page to keep you reading.

As a matter of fact, this book contains some of the best sentences ever written. Here's a couple of my personal fav's...

"He had a big soul which he sold by the hour."

"Father died in a voting accident."

...and my personal favorite sentence in the whole book...

"A convict in transit convinced the cop to whom he was handcuffed that the cop was the guiltier man, at which the cop shot him and escaped."

That one had me laughing for hours.
It's little jewels like this that kept me reading.

The often times befuddling plotline gets saved easily by Aylett's superb writing...in my opinion anyways. It reminded me of 'Naked Lunch' in a bizzarre sort of a way... where almost every line you read is a quotable piece of warped poetry, or song lyric, or sample for a song. Granted, this style of writing can be hard to swallow at times; but, when you are in the mood for this book, it's incredible. My most deeply layered wit grinned many times at Aylett's seemingly random/chaotic craftiness.

If paranoid schizophrenia and sociopathic behavior suddenly became extremely contagious most every major city would resemble Beerlight--if you made sure that the unbalanced but well medicated citizens all had unlimited amouts of firepower at their disposal.

Slaughtermatic hits the ground running and doesn't stop. No one, not the reader or the characters have time to slow down and figure out what the hell is going on with the story. I'm not really sure what Aylett's objective was, perhaps, he wanted to create a book that only a homocidal reader could fully comprehend.

Still, if you suspend your disbelief as well as any hope of making sense of the story, it can be a fun ride.

This has got to be one of the cleverest science fiction/dystopian/comic texts I've read since...well, I'm not quite sure...but it was probably something by Baudrillard. This novel was laugh out loud funny at times, especially Cubit's frantic race from the law that mirror's (almost exactly) his pre-flight, TV car chace-influenced imaginings. A fast-paced and humorous read for fans of postmodern critical theory, cyberpunk, or straight-forward slapstick comedy. Think William Gibson as re-written by Douglas Addams and filmed by the Cohen Brothers and you'll start to get an idea of what this wacky and wonderful text is like.

Great cyberpunk sort of tongue in cheek freakshow ultraviolent book. It's really short, but packed with bizarre details and asides, the story flies off in different directions, but somehow is still really easy to follow and read through. Sometimes the story just stops dead for a bizarre ramble or aside about ridiculous moments in the history of the universe of this storyline and the city of Beerlight. Sometimes the story itself is the bizarre ramble.

Ultimately though this book was fun as hell to read. One of my favorite goofy fun violent stories.

A great book Steve Aylett is one of my favorite authors cant wait to read the rest of his books..

While reading to the end of this book i came across page 118 & 119. They were identical pages same words on each page. Did anyone else come by this same error??