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Lint: The Incredible Career of Cult Author Jeff Lint
"There was also a problem with the first edition of Rigor Mortis. The biographical notes on the back cover— with the by now inevitable photo of Lint kissing a tortoise— stated that Lint had died in 1972. The media, poised to praise him after his death, sprang in with lamentations that he had been tragically neglected by commercial enterprise and that it was baffling that his artistic genius had not been more appreciated. Their bitter embarrassment upon learning that he was still alive and open to their patronage drove a bigger wedge than ever between the media and Lint— they had no recourse but to pretend he did not exist at all. ‘So in terms of money, publicity and ease of progress,’ Lint observed, ‘all remains the same.’" Jeff Lint was author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century.
He transcended genre in classics such as Jelly Result and The Stupid Conversation, becoming a cult figure and pariah. Like his contemporary Philip K. Dick, he was blithely ahead of his time. Aylett follows Lint through his Beat days; his immersion in pulp SF, psychedelia and resentment; his disastrous scripts for Star Trek and Patton; the controversies of The Caterer comic and the scariest kids' cartoon ever aired; and his belated Hollywood success in the 1990s. It was a career haunted by death, including the undetected death of his agent, the suspicious death of his rival Herzog, and the unshakable "Lint is dead" rumors, which persisted even after his death.
He transcended genre in classics such as Jelly Result and The Stupid Conversation, becoming a cult figure and pariah. Like his contemporary Philip K. Dick, he was blithely ahead of his time. Aylett follows Lint through his Beat days; his immersion in pulp SF, psychedelia and resentment; his disastrous scripts for Star Trek and Patton; the controversies of The Caterer comic and the scariest kids' cartoon ever aired; and his belated Hollywood success in the 1990s. It was a career haunted by death, including the undetected death of his agent, the suspicious death of his rival Herzog, and the unshakable "Lint is dead" rumors, which persisted even after his death.
210 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 3, 2005
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972 people want to read
About the author
Steve Aylett
47 books158 followersSteve Aylett is a satirical science fiction and weird slipstream author of books such as LINT, The Book Lovers and Slaughtermatic, and comics including Hyperthick. He is known for his colourful satire attacking the manipulations of authority. Aylett is synaesthetic. He lives in Scotland.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
April 6, 2017
Who the FUCK has been hiding Steve Aylett from me for thirty-nine years. I want answers. What is this, a conspiracy of librarians? A booksellers' union grudge? This rebarbative but very funny novel takes the form of a biography of the pulp writer Jeff Lint – a sort of mash-up of Phillip K Dick, Robert E Howard and Alan Moore – and it is filled with more surprising word-collocations and startling throwaway ideas than anything I've read for months. From the opening, I was hooked:
Um…yes, I'll have two hundred pages of that, please. Across twenty-seven chapters – whose academic style soon dissolves into a kind of lysergic incomprehensibility – we learn the details of Lint's eventful career, including not just his fictional output (such as ‘the trash novel Sadly Disappointed about a child who is not possessed by the devil’), but also his forays into television in the form of a Star Trek script (in which ‘the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon’), his brush with Hollywood, his role as a New Mexican guru, and his work as a lyricist with a prog-rock band, penning such tracks as ‘DNA Interruption Charm’, ‘Through the Keyhole I Saw the Funeral of a Duck’ and ‘Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades’.
The tone is synaesthetic and off-kilter, but nevertheless in a tradition of British comic writing that feels familiar in the oddest places. Near the end of the book comes one of its best lines:
…which is pure Douglas Adams. But in other ways the voice is recognisably post-Chris Morris, except it's like all of Chris Morris's career concertinaed together, from the exact journalese of On The Hour (headlines mentioned in this book include WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT and the misprint-result OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW) through to the ambient, adrenal creepiness of Blue Jam, reflected here in the descriptions of Lint's terrifying cartoon series Catty and the Major.
Aylett's rococo non-sequiturs, and his tinges of weird fiction and body-horror, put him somewhere on the edge of the bizarro camp, except that unlike most bizarro authors Aylett can really write. Like Lint, he spends much of this book ‘rampaging through the English language like a buffalo’; at times his words seem like mere aesthetic objects, with no referents in the real world, and your eyes start to glaze over; but at others, they connect with a jolt. Again, a description of Lint's writing applies just as well to his creator's:
I found that you needed a run-up with the prose before you warmed up to it; then a certain cumulative effect kicked in, and every sentence became hilarious. But if I read too much, it overwhelmed me again. This is a book best consumed in medium doses.
I was in a strange place when I read Lint – working twenty-hour days and sleeping somewhere new every night. I would fall into bed at 1 a.m. with my alarm set for quarter to five, and read a few paragraphs of this before I passed out. In this drained, hypnotic state, I found that the gnomic pronouncements of Jeff Lint (‘Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety’) actually started to make a weird kind of sense. Worrying, perhaps. Part of me would like to see this talent reined in a little more by some formal discipline, but I will forgive a lot for a book that made me laugh out loud as often and as uncontrollably (like holding-in-giggles-during-school-assembly uncontrollable) as this one did. I emerged confused, but buffed into a creative hypersensitivity.
You can take these away with you:
Pulp science fiction author Jeff Lint has loomed large as an influence on my own work since I found a scarred copy of I Blame Ferns in a Charing Cross basement, an apparently baffled chef staring down from the cover. After that I hunted down all the Lint stuff I could find and became a connoisseur of the subtly varying blank stares of booksellers throughout the world.
Um…yes, I'll have two hundred pages of that, please. Across twenty-seven chapters – whose academic style soon dissolves into a kind of lysergic incomprehensibility – we learn the details of Lint's eventful career, including not just his fictional output (such as ‘the trash novel Sadly Disappointed about a child who is not possessed by the devil’), but also his forays into television in the form of a Star Trek script (in which ‘the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon’), his brush with Hollywood, his role as a New Mexican guru, and his work as a lyricist with a prog-rock band, penning such tracks as ‘DNA Interruption Charm’, ‘Through the Keyhole I Saw the Funeral of a Duck’ and ‘Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades’.
The tone is synaesthetic and off-kilter, but nevertheless in a tradition of British comic writing that feels familiar in the oddest places. Near the end of the book comes one of its best lines:
On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.
…which is pure Douglas Adams. But in other ways the voice is recognisably post-Chris Morris, except it's like all of Chris Morris's career concertinaed together, from the exact journalese of On The Hour (headlines mentioned in this book include WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT and the misprint-result OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW) through to the ambient, adrenal creepiness of Blue Jam, reflected here in the descriptions of Lint's terrifying cartoon series Catty and the Major.
Aylett's rococo non-sequiturs, and his tinges of weird fiction and body-horror, put him somewhere on the edge of the bizarro camp, except that unlike most bizarro authors Aylett can really write. Like Lint, he spends much of this book ‘rampaging through the English language like a buffalo’; at times his words seem like mere aesthetic objects, with no referents in the real world, and your eyes start to glaze over; but at others, they connect with a jolt. Again, a description of Lint's writing applies just as well to his creator's:
Every sentence expands in all directions at once and it becomes immersive to the point of hallucination. The story falls away into a heavy feverdream, a sort of constant metamorphosis parade. Ideas turn corners on themselves and thump axes in their own backs.
I found that you needed a run-up with the prose before you warmed up to it; then a certain cumulative effect kicked in, and every sentence became hilarious. But if I read too much, it overwhelmed me again. This is a book best consumed in medium doses.
I was in a strange place when I read Lint – working twenty-hour days and sleeping somewhere new every night. I would fall into bed at 1 a.m. with my alarm set for quarter to five, and read a few paragraphs of this before I passed out. In this drained, hypnotic state, I found that the gnomic pronouncements of Jeff Lint (‘Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety’) actually started to make a weird kind of sense. Worrying, perhaps. Part of me would like to see this talent reined in a little more by some formal discipline, but I will forgive a lot for a book that made me laugh out loud as often and as uncontrollably (like holding-in-giggles-during-school-assembly uncontrollable) as this one did. I emerged confused, but buffed into a creative hypersensitivity.
You can take these away with you:
● It was repeatedly rumoured that Lint's gonzo article ‘Mashed Drug Mutants’ had a subtext that was nothing to do with drugs, but Lint denied this.
● [during McCarthy's anti-Communist crackdowns] Lint was twitted the same year when three friends dressed as cops raided his apartment and found him forcing a bust of Lenin down the toilet.
● Lint had recently been hired to create a tourist slogan for the town, and came up with ‘Holiday parasites are welcome in a way, aren't they?’
● In response to astronomers' observations that the universe seemed to be rushing away from us, he remarked ‘Wouldn't you?’
December 31, 2007
This book is a godsend and has saved me from financial and mental collapse.
When I was young, my father would force me watch old recordings of Lint's Catty and the Major whenever I misbehaved. After developing a tolerance to the emotional damage, Catty and the Major became my favorite program and I began participating in nightly massacres of my neighbor's pets to incur my father's wrath. So he discovered what I was up to and threw out all the Catty and the Major tapes.
After that, I was always staying home from school to vomit to the tune of all the withdrawal symptoms that accompany a life without Catty and the Major. I started reading horribly written novelizations of Catty and the Major (my father was fine with it as long as Lint didn't do the writing) in order to ease my pain. Then I graduated to consorting with shady characters covered in fudge and traveling to nefarious used bookstores built on minefields in order to get to get my hands on another Lint paperback. And this dangerous lifestyle has continued to this day...
...until the release of this book. Contained within its pages is everything about Jeff Lint's books (and comics and plays and movies) that I've ever wanted to know. Steve Aylett has condensed Lint's work into one marvelous book, leaving in all the good bits, eliminating the tedious moments, and making my unhealthy activities a thing of the past.
I will never leave my room again.
When I was young, my father would force me watch old recordings of Lint's Catty and the Major whenever I misbehaved. After developing a tolerance to the emotional damage, Catty and the Major became my favorite program and I began participating in nightly massacres of my neighbor's pets to incur my father's wrath. So he discovered what I was up to and threw out all the Catty and the Major tapes.
After that, I was always staying home from school to vomit to the tune of all the withdrawal symptoms that accompany a life without Catty and the Major. I started reading horribly written novelizations of Catty and the Major (my father was fine with it as long as Lint didn't do the writing) in order to ease my pain. Then I graduated to consorting with shady characters covered in fudge and traveling to nefarious used bookstores built on minefields in order to get to get my hands on another Lint paperback. And this dangerous lifestyle has continued to this day...
...until the release of this book. Contained within its pages is everything about Jeff Lint's books (and comics and plays and movies) that I've ever wanted to know. Steve Aylett has condensed Lint's work into one marvelous book, leaving in all the good bits, eliminating the tedious moments, and making my unhealthy activities a thing of the past.
I will never leave my room again.
August 10, 2011
While we were writing a paper in my 12th grade history class, our teacher gave us some sage advice about what to do when you come up with a dazzling turn of phrase that doesn't serve your thesis: Cut it out and put it in a little box. Aylett apparently had such a box, and has emptied it into this book. These gems, in the forms of the titles of Lint's books, the names of the pulps in which he published when starting out, his critics reactions to his work and his reactions to his critics, often compare favorably to those of Dick, Burroughs, and Vonnegut, and I ate them up greedily. But I should tell you that they're all that holds the book together. Although the story is perfectly linear and has a beginning, middle, and an end, it is as flat as Nebraska. Nothing unfolds, nothing develops, things just happen. It's also interesting that Aylett has converged on a vibe that strongly reminded me of the stuff Woody Allen used to write, as collected in Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, especially the thematically similar "The Metterling Lists." Take home lesson, I dug it, it could have been shorter, and if you're less superficial than me you may want to bail after a few chapters.
November 6, 2009
Fake bio of an extremely eccentric, obscure science-fiction writer. Aylett's masterpiece. The book is frequently hilarious and disturbing in a way that is almost impossible to describe. Suffice it to say that like all of Aylett's most memorable characters, Jeff Lint is at war with the fabric of the cosmos itself, and wields language as a weapon. Also in keeping with Aylett, the most preposterous phrases and assertions are welded to a rock-solid earnest delivery. It's like someone trying to hold up a bank wielding a rubber chicken, oblivious to the mirth that ensues. Consider some of the titles from Lint's oeuvre: One Less Bastard, Nose Furnace, I Eat Fog. And I haven't even mention the comic-book excerpt - The Caterer.
February 8, 2022
A comic faux-biography of a fictitious author: very stupid and sometimes incredibly funny... but, for me, not a good enough joke to be stretched out across a whole book. The best parts of this could be edited down into a dynamite short story – I especially loved the saga of a sinister kids’ TV show called Catty and the Major. I laughed out loud frequently during the first few chapters; by the last, I was starting to find the deliberately off-the-wall phrasing tiresome. Definitely fun if savoured in bite-size chunks.
TinyLetter | Linktree
TinyLetter | Linktree
August 8, 2023
Very funny, but that’s about it. I respect Aylett’s commitment to writing what are basically just short books of clever sentences, but I’ve found both of his novels that I’ve read so far to be too random and scattered. I want to love it since I love so many things that are similar to this, but it doesn’t fully click with me yet.
September 3, 2017
Oh wow.
How to even start approaching a review of this?
Oh, I know - I won't.
EDIT: Look up "Steve Aylett's LINT THE MOVIE" on YouTube!!
How to even start approaching a review of this?
Oh, I know - I won't.
EDIT: Look up "Steve Aylett's LINT THE MOVIE" on YouTube!!
April 14, 2017
You know how some really great Guided by Voices melodies are ruined by the absolutely absurdist lyrical poetry of Robert Pollard where, like, where he sings something goofily impressionist like "Asparagus reaper vestigial tail" instead of something concrete like "In the morning, at dawn, the boys set sail" (for example)? That's what's kicking me in the nuts about this book. It's a great idea, this book, with, yes, flashes of brilliance, but the author seems to insist on doing absolutely nothing in the way of making his fake titles sound real, that they fit in the New Wave sci-fi pulp era (Ballard, Dick, Disch, Ellison, Moorcock, Sladek). It's also highly manic, the narrative. Not my mode, but that's not the author's fault, eh? Have enjoyed, though, the chapters on Star Trek and the surreal cartoon show Catty and the Major (which seems to inform the Creepypasta descriptions of the lost episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy). Aylett was ahead of his time, but, also, he was waaaay over there. There. There Just over the other horizon. Over there, and ahead.
Plus: Loved the illustration of Lint holding a sign reading "I'm Growing Fins" at a 50's commie demonstration. More people should do this.
Plus: Loved the illustration of Lint holding a sign reading "I'm Growing Fins" at a 50's commie demonstration. More people should do this.
April 14, 2013
A RESULT, IF NOT QUITE A FULL BELLY
Aylett’s biographical study of the notorious pulp author Jeff Lint is a teasingly exquisite piece. It takes your hand, leads you into the tire-kicking world of the much-maligned writer and shows you so many tantalising insights into his life. I loved it but it left me wanting so much more. What colour were the velvet swatches held by Lint and Herzog in the freezing lot? How high were Herzog’s graph paper barricades? What shape were the gnostic knobs Lint manipulated without effect? Did Lint favour short of fuller length gowns when submitting his work? These questions remain unanswered, simply, I suspect, because the author was perplexed by a cloud of choking black dust. But these omissions are flawless fragments of a larger picture. Overall this is a fascinating examination of an underrated mind, written with panache and clandestine mundanity. A must-read for all Lint fans.
Aylett’s biographical study of the notorious pulp author Jeff Lint is a teasingly exquisite piece. It takes your hand, leads you into the tire-kicking world of the much-maligned writer and shows you so many tantalising insights into his life. I loved it but it left me wanting so much more. What colour were the velvet swatches held by Lint and Herzog in the freezing lot? How high were Herzog’s graph paper barricades? What shape were the gnostic knobs Lint manipulated without effect? Did Lint favour short of fuller length gowns when submitting his work? These questions remain unanswered, simply, I suspect, because the author was perplexed by a cloud of choking black dust. But these omissions are flawless fragments of a larger picture. Overall this is a fascinating examination of an underrated mind, written with panache and clandestine mundanity. A must-read for all Lint fans.
October 17, 2007
Moments of pure genius, sadly watered down to fit 200 pages. Reminds me a lot of Radio 4's 3-part fake biography on Crichton Wheeler, lifelong sufferer of Splicer's Disease. Just as the protagonist of Wheeler's Fortune has an imaginary ailment that quickly becomes tiresome, Lint's mentalism takes a backseat to just about everything else in the book, in effect relegating him to the position of shit-magnet.
That said, read in short bursts, Lint is much more tolerable, and it's mean to pan it entirely. Aylett is obviously a first-rate mentalist in his own right, and revels in his (ab)use of language, which is both strange and wonderful. Genius shines out on several occasions - Lint's theories on creation and the JFK assassination are particularly hilarious.
That said, read in short bursts, Lint is much more tolerable, and it's mean to pan it entirely. Aylett is obviously a first-rate mentalist in his own right, and revels in his (ab)use of language, which is both strange and wonderful. Genius shines out on several occasions - Lint's theories on creation and the JFK assassination are particularly hilarious.
January 13, 2025
I pride myself on being able to laugh at anything and everything, especially the wacky but whilst there were moments where I really belly laughed, I had to wade through so much unfunny nonsense to get to it that I wanted to murder Steve Aylett by the end.
The redeeming feature was that the unfunny nonsense sent me right off to sleep at bedtime so I'm feeling very well rested.
I will give it kudos for making me belly laugh at all though, this is only the second ever book to achieve more than an exhalation from my nostrils in humour.
Goodbye Jeff Lint. I look forward to never reading about your non-existent life ever again.
The redeeming feature was that the unfunny nonsense sent me right off to sleep at bedtime so I'm feeling very well rested.
I will give it kudos for making me belly laugh at all though, this is only the second ever book to achieve more than an exhalation from my nostrils in humour.
Goodbye Jeff Lint. I look forward to never reading about your non-existent life ever again.
November 4, 2013
Steve Aylett's Lint is a very silly, very strange little book about what has to be the worlds most difficult novelist Jeff Lint. I really liked the damm thing, but I also have to say that it was nowhere nearly as brilliant as I've been told, although the likes of Alan Moore do not agree.
Excellent surrealism, and a wicked sense of humor still makes Lint highly recommended.
Excellent surrealism, and a wicked sense of humor still makes Lint highly recommended.
May 6, 2017
Some lines are really funny. Unfortunately, every line is meant to be funny, so the final percentage is not that many landed. I think it may be a bit too madcap for me, despite some genuinely enjoyable moments. Maybe this would have made for a better short story.
Read
July 27, 2011I didn't finish this to be honest. I did kind of enjoy it and I thought it was somewhat amusing but not enough to justify not reading a book I would enjoy more.
February 24, 2019
I didn't really know what to make of this at first, but now I've finished it I'm... Actually I'm none the wiser. It's a strange, patchy book. The biography of a fictional American pulp sci-fi author, written by a brit. At first I thought the constant British slang (shite, arse, and so on) was a weakness but I think its more of a running joke because its so blatant, especially coupled with other jokes like the crazy exchange rates he uses when converting dollar values to pounds. Most of the humour derives from the absurdity, with ridiculous story titles, plots and dialogue, but the narrative itself is absurd too, and in a way that doesn't always work. I found it didn't really flow well, and was sort of annoying to read at times, even though there are occasional moments of brilliance and I laughed out loud a few times. The cumulative effect is pretty good but it's hard work and hence only 3 stars.
October 2, 2021
I had high hopes for this, but the joke a minute pace started to wear thin after a couple of chapters. I didn't find the cockamamie antics and Lints kooky experiences actually that funny. I could be harsh, as I liked the segments with Catty & Major and The Caterer. Fictional interweaving of real events, as Lint is lionized by his followers were novel, but at times it was just weird for the sake of being weird without much thought behind it.
August 3, 2024
Not as fun as the Beerlight books but I did enjoy the bits about Lint's work in experimental theater and TV. A biography of a fictional pulp author is kind of the perfect format for someone like Aylett to get their more off-the-wall ideas out of their head but at the same time I was pretty exhausted by the end of it.
did-not-finish
April 21, 2021Purportedly a mock-biography, it seems more like an exercise in stringing together non sequitors as story titles or quotes from the main character. Got some chuckles but I see it getting really grating really quickly.
March 13, 2017
Word salad. Your mileage may vary.
August 22, 2011
“When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.”
-- Jeff Lint
An orgy for synthesists, Steve Aylett’s Lint is the false biography of imaginary science fiction writer, weirdo guru and psychedelic wild man, Jeff Lint. Author of such baffling bits of literary vandalism as One Less Bastard, I Blame Ferns and Nose Furnace, Lint is an amalgam of probably dozens of weird personalities. He is alternately William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, and even underground punk legend Mark E. Smith (!) while recording the psychedelic disaster, The Energy Draining Church Bazaar with The Unofficial Smile Group.
But above all, Jeff Lint is a ham-fisted cipher for cult icon, science fiction author Philip K. Dick – the paranoia, the madness, the anti-establishmentarianism and the poverty, the endless stream of half-baked material, Lint is a love letter to one of science fictions’ true eccentrics, and to all eccentrics.
Aylett chronicles the crooked life and times of Jeff (Jack) Lint, from his depression-era childhood spent digging for undiscovered colors in his front lawn, through his New York City pulp years, selling his first story under the pseudonym Isaac Asimov, (much to the consternation of the real Isaac Asimov,) to the rumors of his demise, which strangely persisted even after his death.
The book is filled with stray sentences from Lint’s work, broken aphorisms and sticky metaphors, beautifully wretched book covers, and even still cartoon frames and comics (Lint was the creator of the ultra-violent Caterer comics of the 1970’s, and the frighteningly morbid children’s cartoon, Catty and The Major.)
With Lint, Steve Aylett has created a legend for our times, a man who never was but damn well should have been. Read it on the crowded train on the way home and cackle wildly to yourself, you’ll get more room that way.
-- Jeff Lint
An orgy for synthesists, Steve Aylett’s Lint is the false biography of imaginary science fiction writer, weirdo guru and psychedelic wild man, Jeff Lint. Author of such baffling bits of literary vandalism as One Less Bastard, I Blame Ferns and Nose Furnace, Lint is an amalgam of probably dozens of weird personalities. He is alternately William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, and even underground punk legend Mark E. Smith (!) while recording the psychedelic disaster, The Energy Draining Church Bazaar with The Unofficial Smile Group.
But above all, Jeff Lint is a ham-fisted cipher for cult icon, science fiction author Philip K. Dick – the paranoia, the madness, the anti-establishmentarianism and the poverty, the endless stream of half-baked material, Lint is a love letter to one of science fictions’ true eccentrics, and to all eccentrics.
Aylett chronicles the crooked life and times of Jeff (Jack) Lint, from his depression-era childhood spent digging for undiscovered colors in his front lawn, through his New York City pulp years, selling his first story under the pseudonym Isaac Asimov, (much to the consternation of the real Isaac Asimov,) to the rumors of his demise, which strangely persisted even after his death.
The book is filled with stray sentences from Lint’s work, broken aphorisms and sticky metaphors, beautifully wretched book covers, and even still cartoon frames and comics (Lint was the creator of the ultra-violent Caterer comics of the 1970’s, and the frighteningly morbid children’s cartoon, Catty and The Major.)
With Lint, Steve Aylett has created a legend for our times, a man who never was but damn well should have been. Read it on the crowded train on the way home and cackle wildly to yourself, you’ll get more room that way.
February 6, 2017
3.5 stars/ Steve Aylett gives William Goldman a run for his money in Lint, and at times, I had to whip out my phone to triple-check that Jeff Lint was not some real, obscure pulp writer. As in books like the Princess Bride, Aylett is able to distance himself from everything quoted in this book, and criticize or laud it as he sees fit. This gives him a license to literally say anything, and he does.
The genius of the book is in how Aylett presents Lint: as a totally delusional, sometimes monstrous, almost alien creature, whose faux-poignant writings always hover on the brink of making some sort of sense. Ultimately, Lint sheds light on a vast swath of writers who attempt to dredge meaning out of nothingness; those who masturbate over the beauty of phrases and sentences, whose meaning holds up to no level of rational scrutiny. I really admired this portrayal; it must be a difficult one to get exactly right, and Aylett gets it right.
What an odd book: the reader sympathizes the whole way through with Lint's detractors and critics, and wishes nothing good upon the titular character. Highly recommended for those with a love for the surreal or an appreciation for the nonsensical. Not so much for those looking for plot or narrative coherence.
The genius of the book is in how Aylett presents Lint: as a totally delusional, sometimes monstrous, almost alien creature, whose faux-poignant writings always hover on the brink of making some sort of sense. Ultimately, Lint sheds light on a vast swath of writers who attempt to dredge meaning out of nothingness; those who masturbate over the beauty of phrases and sentences, whose meaning holds up to no level of rational scrutiny. I really admired this portrayal; it must be a difficult one to get exactly right, and Aylett gets it right.
What an odd book: the reader sympathizes the whole way through with Lint's detractors and critics, and wishes nothing good upon the titular character. Highly recommended for those with a love for the surreal or an appreciation for the nonsensical. Not so much for those looking for plot or narrative coherence.
April 19, 2016
The fictional biography of Jeff Lint, an eccentric writer who started out writing for pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Troubling Developments, and later became a cult literary figure. There are some funny satirical bits, especially the section about Lint's time in Hollywood, where he created "Catty and the Major," a children's cartoon so disturbing that it is best remembered for the recurring nightmares it caused. The descriptions of Lint's comic book, his script for a musical version of Patton, and a psychedelic Star Trek episode are quite amusing as well.
However, a lot of the rest of the book gets bogged down in not being as clever as the author seems to think it is. Much of the story is Lint doing random nonsensical things, padded out with strings of non-sequiturs quoted from Lint's "books." It's kind of boring, actually. I assume Aylett's going for a completely surrealistic feeling, which I guess he accomplished, but at the same time, nothing really happens. It's just a lot of random weirdness that doesn't go anywhere. Sounds great in concept, but only so-so in execution.
However, a lot of the rest of the book gets bogged down in not being as clever as the author seems to think it is. Much of the story is Lint doing random nonsensical things, padded out with strings of non-sequiturs quoted from Lint's "books." It's kind of boring, actually. I assume Aylett's going for a completely surrealistic feeling, which I guess he accomplished, but at the same time, nothing really happens. It's just a lot of random weirdness that doesn't go anywhere. Sounds great in concept, but only so-so in execution.
October 5, 2013
I heard of Aylett from Warren Ellis's blog, in which it was mentioned that he was a friend of both Ellis and Grant Morrison. It also probably helps that the book carries recommendations from Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock.
Lint is a fake biography which won me immediately on the first page when it mentions (and I will paraphrase badly) that Lint's first work was published "after being submitted under the pen name Isaac Asimov." The book never gets funnier than that, but it does have its moments.
The book is absurd, but I much prefer the laugh-out-loud stories of Mark Leyner to Aylett's smartly winking satire. Lint reminds me a bit of Robert Anton Wilson or the writings of the Church of the Subgenius.
That means that some of you would probably adore this book, and others would likely hate it. I tend to fall in the middle. I did like it. The brevity probably helps. Still, I felt it could have been a little better, and I suspect there's a couple of regular around here who could have done a better job; but I may try Aylett again.
Lint is a fake biography which won me immediately on the first page when it mentions (and I will paraphrase badly) that Lint's first work was published "after being submitted under the pen name Isaac Asimov." The book never gets funnier than that, but it does have its moments.
The book is absurd, but I much prefer the laugh-out-loud stories of Mark Leyner to Aylett's smartly winking satire. Lint reminds me a bit of Robert Anton Wilson or the writings of the Church of the Subgenius.
That means that some of you would probably adore this book, and others would likely hate it. I tend to fall in the middle. I did like it. The brevity probably helps. Still, I felt it could have been a little better, and I suspect there's a couple of regular around here who could have done a better job; but I may try Aylett again.
January 28, 2017
Absurd? Absurd!
June 11, 2010
This is the biography of Jeff Lint, a man who, whilst he doesn't actually exist, thoroughly deserves to. A fictional tale of a creative cult figure this book straddles surrealism, nonsense, originality, plausibility, and general audacious inventiveness and is packed with an incredible number of ideas (many of which might fill whole books of their own). I'd put off reading this because I've also written something along mildly similar lines (I hasten to add, conceived well before I knew about the existence of Lint), and didn't want to be influenced; but it would be impossible to tangent off these ideas for they're specific to Aylett's skewed imagination. The best thing about this book is that it doesn't all work - meaning Aylett hasn't toned down for the masses. Not having been a great fan of his other work, I can heartily recommend this.
December 17, 2015
A fictional biography of Jeff Lint, a strange and idiosyncratic pulp SF writer whose career and life were increasingly odd and yet consistent in their incoherence. Aylett has a great flair for description, though the comedy of the book often veers past "funny" and into "charmingly weird". This isn't a complaint - there are some great jokes in here, running gags that build amusingly (like Lint's grudge with a rival author-turned-critic) - but when half the reviews of a book talk about "laughing til I cried" and the like, I always feel a little disappointed when I don't have a similar reaction. One of my favourite parts of the book is the illustrations - artwork from Lint's books, his music project and his abortive and frightening cartoon, that are just strange enough to be wholly plausible. All the little nods to real-world figures are great, too.
May 7, 2013
I found this amazingly well written. Although, I had to read it in spurts as it was a bit much at times.
This is an interesting concept, an autobiography of a fictional pulp author. I didn't realize at first that the subject was made up and started racking my brains trying to match up the pulp titles I read as a youngster.
Using a mash up of several prominently weird pulp authors as the idea behind Jeff Lint, this works extremely well. The book is bizarre but extremely funny.
I'm going to have to look for a wishlist to send this off to, as it deserves to go to someone who wants to read it rather than the serendipity of wild releasing it.
This is an interesting concept, an autobiography of a fictional pulp author. I didn't realize at first that the subject was made up and started racking my brains trying to match up the pulp titles I read as a youngster.
Using a mash up of several prominently weird pulp authors as the idea behind Jeff Lint, this works extremely well. The book is bizarre but extremely funny.
I'm going to have to look for a wishlist to send this off to, as it deserves to go to someone who wants to read it rather than the serendipity of wild releasing it.
December 27, 2012
This is a funny book, although I have a feeling that large chunks of it went over my head, and that it may actually be an hilarious book.
The Star Trek chapter was brilliant, and my favourite line in the book was this:
"On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death."
The Star Trek chapter was brilliant, and my favourite line in the book was this:
"On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death."
August 29, 2016
Look, obviously some people like this book a lot. I wanted to- it was recommended (via anonymous sign) at the library. But, man. I obviously didn't get it, and after not very long didn't particularly want to. Gave up (even though I was on an airplane). Not sure whether I can count this as a square for library bingo, but it was worth giving up. Not for me!
April 30, 2022
I actually laughed quite a lot while reading this but it is a bit samey. I started reading thinking Lint was a real writer and so when I tumbled, it lost a little humour. Steve Aylett has lots of ideas, which kept it amusing, but the repetitious style meant that it needed more variety. It took much longer to read than I anticipated,
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It reminded me a little of the Scarfolk book.
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It reminded me a little of the Scarfolk book.
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