Atom

Atom, Steve Aylett, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2000

This dark, noir novel is about a private detective named Taffy Atom, a person right out of a Raymond Chandler novel, whose partner is a talking piranha the size of a bulldog.

It is set in the near future city of Beerlight, a place of nightly shootouts and the sort of criminals worthy of Dick Tracy. Atom finds himself in the middle when a gang of desperadoes are willing to go to any lengths to achieve the existential peace that goes along with possessing the brain of Franz Kafka.

Of course, underworld types come with lots of firepower, but these aren't your average pistols and submachine guns. In this city, they pack things like dumb guns, Persuader semi-egotistics, or the infamous loop mine, which cycles the victim through the same couple of hours over and over.

Beerlight is a very surreal sort of place. A gangster decorates his fort according to the principles of Bren Shui: "the art of exchanging negative energy with the environment through the correct placement of firearms around the house." A syndication bomb might suddenly explode and convert everything to a living John Updike novel.

As you might have guessed, this is a very strange novel. Fans of Raymond Chandler or "weird" fiction will have a great time with this story. For everyone else, this is another one that belongs in the large gray area of Pretty Good or Worth Reading.