With Slaughtermatic, nominated for the 1998 Philip K. Dick Award for best original paperback of the year, Steve Aylett introduced us to the charming burg of Beerlight, where to kill is "less a murder than a mannerism."

In Toxicology, Aylett’s latest invasion of the New World, the "wickedly funny" mastermind expands his sordid and hilarious universe. Twenty short stories — ten of which appear here for the first time — are included in the collection. Some are extensions of the Beerlight world of heroic criminals and villainous cops — others are set in unique worlds, amalgams of Aylett’s twisted, J. G. Ballard-like nightmare visions and sardonic sense of humor.

"If Armstrong Was Interesting" is a series of scenarios positing how the American hero might have jazzed up his voyage to the moon and back. In "Gigantic" corpses rain from the sky, payback for the massacres and casual murders of our century. "Dread Honour" is a first-person send-up of a more traditional English tale, told by a narrator in the habit of taking his Earl Grey "intravenously." "The Met Are All for This" is a (hilarious) cyberpunk transformation of Kafka’s "Metamorphosis."

Aylett takes us beyond cyberpunk and the fiction of the brat-pack chroniclers of New York and London nightlife. He is in the vanguard of an irreverent, thoughtful and very funny new generation of writers.

Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967. He is the author of Slaughtermatic (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998; published in the U.K. by Orion).

PRAISE FOR STEVE AYLETT:

"Both the bullets and the gags fly fast and furious in Steve Aylett’s hyper-kinetically violent, hilarious time-traveling crime caper… While the body count is high, the tone is anything but grim, thanks to Aylett’s wickedly funny commentary on this bullet-riddled, nihilistic metropolis and its inhabitants." — The New York Times Book Review

"A terrific read.… Like Dashiell Hammett scripting a story for 2000AD spacegirl Halo Jones, this is sci-fi for non-geeks." — The Face

"Not only conceptually brilliant and satirically walloping, but stylistically innovative." — Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

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