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Accomplice #1
Only an Alligator
Undermined by creep channels, home to soul-eating demons bored by their bland diet, the last resting place of the frayed and venerable Moral Fibre, Accomplice is a city like no other. Only Steve Aylett's extraordinary imagination could have created it, only his prose could have brought it to such frankly bizarre life. Accomplice is where William Burroughs would have dragged Alice to once he'd kidnapped her from Wonderland. It is thought provoking and satiric, always odd in ways that only real life can match. In the foreground is the feud between Sweeney, a demon, and Barny, a preoccupied innocent who has inadvertently become Sweeney's nemesis. Barny's immediate circle of friends and co-workers live lives of constantly grotesque scrapes on the bizarre streets of Accomplice. Other characters include Plantin Edge, Beltane Carom, Dietrich Hmmerwire, Golden Sid, Rakeman and doomed Eddie Gallo. More mystical are Accomplice's resident superheroes; the Rip and Dungboy.
224 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 20, 2017
Can't afford industrial-grade psilocybin? Try reading Aylett.
This book – the first of a grisly quartet – uses apparently familiar English words in ways that seem prima facie unfit or alarming; reading it is like watching someone trying to hammer a nail in with a mallard. The sentences give the impression of having been run back and forth through Google Translate a dozen times, before being tidied up by a dispirited editor. Grammar wriggles underfoot, parts of speech shift vertiginously, and words exhibit a kind of semantic drift that at times resembles the dyslexia of someone like Billy Childish, and at other times the studied disorientation of William Burroughs.
His unrelatedness to any other writers makes it a challenge to explain Aylett's peculiar blend of existential horror and vicious slapstick satire to the uninitiated. Try imagining that someone tried to write a PG Wodehouse story in an HP Lovecraft setting – it's something along those lines. PG Lovecraft? The setting, the town of Accomplice, exists in some multi-dimensional borderland accessed by insectoid demons and subject to mysterious breaches of causality and normalcy. The hero, a hapless ingénu called Barny Juno, stumbles across an eight-foot alligator and decides to keep it, though unbeknownst to him the gator is coveted as a prized snack by a gigantic demon called Sweeney. I mean trying to explain the plot is an exercise in futility, but that's the gist of it.
Barny is supported by a bizarre coterie of friends and acquaintances, including Golden Sid (‘a man like a startled ant in overalls’), Plantin ‘Edgy’ Edge (‘standing like a ragged exclamation mark’), GI Bill (‘whose face signalled a detour from the species’), and neglected girlfriend Magenta Blaze (‘It's a sad fact that most of their dates ended with them gazing out on a smashed landscape of slow flames, harking to the call and response of fire hydrants’). And as for Sags Dunbar, well—
His work – like Barny's – is carried out at the ‘Sorting Office’, a dark underground room in the centre of town, where their job is to dispose of a steady flow of objects that are delivered to them, of unknown provenance or import. The work, like many aspects of Accomplice, has the Sisyphean quality of some purgatorial infinity:
As though in a bleak, farcical episode of Scooby-Doo, this gang comes together to help Barny as best they can, as he attempts to disguise his new and dangerous alligator pet from the attentions of the demon netherworld. With generally unsuccessful results.
Something about the way Aylett's phrases seem both exact and wrong is transformative – reading paragraphs of the stuff rewires your brain. He also has a love of interjecting numerous cryptic epigrams and bons mots bizarres (random example: ‘Never arrive at a funeral by parachute’). It is really, really funny, but with a constant sense of existential despair lying somewhere underneath, like one of the terrifying monologues on Chris Morris's Blue Jam. It's not an easy thing to recommend; and yet it's so affecting that you find yourself scrolling frenziedly through your contacts list looking for someone to show it to anyway. Then sit back and wait for the screaming to start.
This book – the first of a grisly quartet – uses apparently familiar English words in ways that seem prima facie unfit or alarming; reading it is like watching someone trying to hammer a nail in with a mallard. The sentences give the impression of having been run back and forth through Google Translate a dozen times, before being tidied up by a dispirited editor. Grammar wriggles underfoot, parts of speech shift vertiginously, and words exhibit a kind of semantic drift that at times resembles the dyslexia of someone like Billy Childish, and at other times the studied disorientation of William Burroughs.
His unrelatedness to any other writers makes it a challenge to explain Aylett's peculiar blend of existential horror and vicious slapstick satire to the uninitiated. Try imagining that someone tried to write a PG Wodehouse story in an HP Lovecraft setting – it's something along those lines. PG Lovecraft? The setting, the town of Accomplice, exists in some multi-dimensional borderland accessed by insectoid demons and subject to mysterious breaches of causality and normalcy. The hero, a hapless ingénu called Barny Juno, stumbles across an eight-foot alligator and decides to keep it, though unbeknownst to him the gator is coveted as a prized snack by a gigantic demon called Sweeney. I mean trying to explain the plot is an exercise in futility, but that's the gist of it.
Barny is supported by a bizarre coterie of friends and acquaintances, including Golden Sid (‘a man like a startled ant in overalls’), Plantin ‘Edgy’ Edge (‘standing like a ragged exclamation mark’), GI Bill (‘whose face signalled a detour from the species’), and neglected girlfriend Magenta Blaze (‘It's a sad fact that most of their dates ended with them gazing out on a smashed landscape of slow flames, harking to the call and response of fire hydrants’). And as for Sags Dunbar, well—
In the past everyone had feared Dunbar because his head was actually a chrysalis for another animal. In recent times his face had been almost transparent and they could see something bustle and shift behind it. Finally he'd stopped short in the middle of a conversation and opened his mouth, from which a bunch of fiddling spider legs fanned. Everything else followed and he was speechless and shaking, the only one without a scream to offer as the dog-sized bug quivered into a corner and stayed there to dry off. But he was a steady worker.
His work – like Barny's – is carried out at the ‘Sorting Office’, a dark underground room in the centre of town, where their job is to dispose of a steady flow of objects that are delivered to them, of unknown provenance or import. The work, like many aspects of Accomplice, has the Sisyphean quality of some purgatorial infinity:
They had devised a number of means of disposal. Some they burned as they covered their faces with rags. Other stuff they tried to eat. The big objects they sculpted into an angular sentinel in a conical hat, which they pelted with cans until everyone became embarrassed and fell silent. Fang would stuff it all in a car boot and drive it over a cliff. Gregor had taken to baking the things in a high-tech ceramics kiln. He would remove the ingredients before the process was complete and form this mush into a poultice for his arse.
As though in a bleak, farcical episode of Scooby-Doo, this gang comes together to help Barny as best they can, as he attempts to disguise his new and dangerous alligator pet from the attentions of the demon netherworld. With generally unsuccessful results.
The rills on its back suggested to Edgy a rigid stage prop representing seawaves, so they painted the gator blue and stood pulling it awkwardly back and forth behind the actors in a production of Violaine's Exhaustion Babe. The audience were baffled, not least because the play was set in an urban wasteland and contained no reference to the sea.
Something about the way Aylett's phrases seem both exact and wrong is transformative – reading paragraphs of the stuff rewires your brain. He also has a love of interjecting numerous cryptic epigrams and bons mots bizarres (random example: ‘Never arrive at a funeral by parachute’). It is really, really funny, but with a constant sense of existential despair lying somewhere underneath, like one of the terrifying monologues on Chris Morris's Blue Jam. It's not an easy thing to recommend; and yet it's so affecting that you find yourself scrolling frenziedly through your contacts list looking for someone to show it to anyway. Then sit back and wait for the screaming to start.
September 29, 2007
Aylett is the Mozart of science fiction: he descends from somewhere bearing complex, beautiful work that defies convention as strongly as it follows conventional forms and he uses his language--words, in Aylett's case--with deft humor that hides how carefully-placed each piece is.
And some will look at it and declare there are "too many notes." Let them.
Only an Alligator is the first of the Accomplice novels: four stories set in the strange, mythical city Accomplice, cut off from the rest of the world by unknown catastrophes and devolving itself into some sort of clockwork parody of degeneration.
Our hero is Barney Juno, a kind and gentle soul who's sole goal is to care for the "winged and stepping creatures of the earth," which puts him completely at odds with everyone else in town. His friends include the town's most downtrodden, eccentric, and publicly artistic miscreants, but what else could he get with 500 eels in his front yard?
Okay... now we head off the main road a little and visit Aylett-land....
The action for the book--actually, the action for the whole series--is set up by Barney stepping into a creepchannel, a sort of nerve running through the earth and used by demons and some humans to travel. While he's there he rescues an alligator.
Yes, an alligator trapped in a demonic nerve through the earth. You're following just fine.
The alligator was left there by the demon Sweeney, who lives below Accomplice, in Hell. Sweeney had been basting the alligator for dinner that night and vows revenge on Juno.
And thus we have the setup: Sweeney and his demons become frustrated by Juno's simple innocence and how hard he is to destroy or subvert, even in a venal and corrupt town like Accomplice. Each failure makes Sweeney even more determined, leading through four books of epic confrontation. And no one in Accomplice finds any of this unusual.
Aylett's genius is misdirection. He puts a pyrotechnic display in one direction, such as his wordplay, and distracts you from the brilliance in the other, such as the morality play and the character development. When I first read the book, I read some sentences out loud to my girlfriend so she could appreciate the humor. After about 10 or 15--stopping for her laughter each time--she realized that these were consecutive sentences in the book. I had read her three paragraphs. Her response was, "It's like each sentence is its own unique thing." Similarly, scenes of surreal humor flew past me before I realized that I understood the plotting so far and recognized the characters and their motivations. Aylett got me laughing and gaping while a strongly-plotted book with well-thought-out characters and wry, if broad, social commentary slipped past my guard and dove into my eyes.
And some will look at it and declare there are "too many notes." Let them.
Only an Alligator is the first of the Accomplice novels: four stories set in the strange, mythical city Accomplice, cut off from the rest of the world by unknown catastrophes and devolving itself into some sort of clockwork parody of degeneration.
Our hero is Barney Juno, a kind and gentle soul who's sole goal is to care for the "winged and stepping creatures of the earth," which puts him completely at odds with everyone else in town. His friends include the town's most downtrodden, eccentric, and publicly artistic miscreants, but what else could he get with 500 eels in his front yard?
Okay... now we head off the main road a little and visit Aylett-land....
The action for the book--actually, the action for the whole series--is set up by Barney stepping into a creepchannel, a sort of nerve running through the earth and used by demons and some humans to travel. While he's there he rescues an alligator.
Yes, an alligator trapped in a demonic nerve through the earth. You're following just fine.
The alligator was left there by the demon Sweeney, who lives below Accomplice, in Hell. Sweeney had been basting the alligator for dinner that night and vows revenge on Juno.
And thus we have the setup: Sweeney and his demons become frustrated by Juno's simple innocence and how hard he is to destroy or subvert, even in a venal and corrupt town like Accomplice. Each failure makes Sweeney even more determined, leading through four books of epic confrontation. And no one in Accomplice finds any of this unusual.
Aylett's genius is misdirection. He puts a pyrotechnic display in one direction, such as his wordplay, and distracts you from the brilliance in the other, such as the morality play and the character development. When I first read the book, I read some sentences out loud to my girlfriend so she could appreciate the humor. After about 10 or 15--stopping for her laughter each time--she realized that these were consecutive sentences in the book. I had read her three paragraphs. Her response was, "It's like each sentence is its own unique thing." Similarly, scenes of surreal humor flew past me before I realized that I understood the plotting so far and recognized the characters and their motivations. Aylett got me laughing and gaping while a strongly-plotted book with well-thought-out characters and wry, if broad, social commentary slipped past my guard and dove into my eyes.
July 4, 2018
I won't bother trying to explain the plot and there's no comparison I can make which would allow you to determine whether Aylett is your kind of thing. But I can't recommend him enough. Just jump in and try and swim. If you find yourself drowning in the language and the lunatic plot then Steve and you are never going to see eye to eye. But if you find yourself laughing out loud then the entire Accomplice series is a treat from start to finish. It's a thin book but that's okay because if you like it you'll read it more than once, and if you don't then it won't take up much room in the recycling bin.
April 4, 2020
Bloody excellent. Aylett is that rare thing: an author with a truly unique voice that's immediately recognisable once you've read a couple of his books. His prose is like literary crack and I'm addicted.
This is the third book I've read by him so far, and it definitely had the most coherent plot. However, the plot itself is still mostly just a vehicle for Aylett's unbridled imagination. You could easily read a detailed synopsis beforehand and still not lose much of the joy of actually reading it, as it's his prose which is the star of the show. I'm in awe of the care he takes to squeeze an enormous amount of surreal humour into practically every sentence. 80% of it is absolute gold dust, and whilst there were the odd paragraphs which didn't hit the mark for me they were certainly rare exceptions.
The best thing about Aylett is that unlike some literary boundary pushers he's genuinely gut-bustingly funny. I've read plenty of weird books which are try-too-hard and either end up being boring, a chore or simply pretentious. Aylett is as far from those things as a writer can be. I adore his weird setups where something totally bizarre happens, then is called back to later in a way that is equally off-the-wall but it suddenly all ties together to make utter sense in-universe.
So, what's it about? Basically, a naive fellow named Barney Juno whose sole wish is to 'care for the winged and stepping creatures of the earth' accidentally wanders into the creepchannel - a different bandwidth of reality - and frees an alligator which is embedded in a meat wall. Turns out, that alligator was due to be a snack for a demon named Sweeney. What follows includes political intrigue, assassination attempts and interdimensional blundering, all against a backdrop of a kind of skewed post-apocalyptic fantasy realm called Accomplice.
I started telling my wife about Aylett and quoting the odd line to her, because I couldn't stop giggling whilst reading and she kept giving me quizzical glances. I later discovered an Aylett interview in which he writes that 'readers tend to quote my stuff to their loved ones while gasping with laughter, so for every rabid fan a minimum of one bitter enemy is created.' I know that blathering on about your favourite author to anyone with ears is about as welcome as waxing lyrical about your dreams, but it's hard not to big him up when he's just so damned GOOD. Everyone should read him, including you, and I'm going to bore my incredibly small circle of acquaintances with rants about him until they join the cult of Steve.
This is the third book I've read by him so far, and it definitely had the most coherent plot. However, the plot itself is still mostly just a vehicle for Aylett's unbridled imagination. You could easily read a detailed synopsis beforehand and still not lose much of the joy of actually reading it, as it's his prose which is the star of the show. I'm in awe of the care he takes to squeeze an enormous amount of surreal humour into practically every sentence. 80% of it is absolute gold dust, and whilst there were the odd paragraphs which didn't hit the mark for me they were certainly rare exceptions.
The best thing about Aylett is that unlike some literary boundary pushers he's genuinely gut-bustingly funny. I've read plenty of weird books which are try-too-hard and either end up being boring, a chore or simply pretentious. Aylett is as far from those things as a writer can be. I adore his weird setups where something totally bizarre happens, then is called back to later in a way that is equally off-the-wall but it suddenly all ties together to make utter sense in-universe.
So, what's it about? Basically, a naive fellow named Barney Juno whose sole wish is to 'care for the winged and stepping creatures of the earth' accidentally wanders into the creepchannel - a different bandwidth of reality - and frees an alligator which is embedded in a meat wall. Turns out, that alligator was due to be a snack for a demon named Sweeney. What follows includes political intrigue, assassination attempts and interdimensional blundering, all against a backdrop of a kind of skewed post-apocalyptic fantasy realm called Accomplice.
I started telling my wife about Aylett and quoting the odd line to her, because I couldn't stop giggling whilst reading and she kept giving me quizzical glances. I later discovered an Aylett interview in which he writes that 'readers tend to quote my stuff to their loved ones while gasping with laughter, so for every rabid fan a minimum of one bitter enemy is created.' I know that blathering on about your favourite author to anyone with ears is about as welcome as waxing lyrical about your dreams, but it's hard not to big him up when he's just so damned GOOD. Everyone should read him, including you, and I'm going to bore my incredibly small circle of acquaintances with rants about him until they join the cult of Steve.
December 31, 2007
The first book in my favorite series. If I were really lazy, I would say it was my favorite book.
May 16, 2020
I liked it, i'm not sure i get everything as the writing style is very weird and unique. never read anything like it. it's very funny and entertaining, but also since some of the sentences are stringed to gether in a very strange way it make for a very slow and sometimes not to easy reading.
April 2, 2024
A weird and wonderful book that throws you into a crazy world. It's a difficult read that gets easier as you go.
February 22, 2012
Judging a Book By Its Cover: I actually find this cover fairly uninspiring. It's too plain for my tastes (Yes, I find the infinite background of logos plain, mainly because I'm not keen on the logo. What do you think they actually are?), although the plastic alligator's okay I guess.
The Review: This book was chosen to be my forfeit book, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to review it. Only An Alligator is the literary equivalent of a magic eye painting - you have to unfocus your brain and let it wash over you, otherwise there is no way to get through this book. By which I mean that the blurb is probably the clearest description of what is supposed to be happening in this book that you will get from it. No, really.
I enjoy the premise of Only An Alligator - a young man pisses off a demon by accident, the demon gets the (very, very mistaken) impression that this man is a genius plotting against him, and everyone who isn't the demon is blissfully unaware of any of the attacks and schemes against them. I enjoy the ideas of it - everyone having a statue that's linked to their life, floor-lobster that breed where there's corruption, a city grown from spores. It quite funny - sometimes from an aspect of the world building, sometimes from the ridiculous situations people end up in, sometimes from their reactions to the same (most of them being acceptance of this as normal), sometimes from Bread Eggs Milk Squick and the reverse Oh Wait This Is My Grocery List. (Fair Warning: links go to TV Tropes. Click at your own peril.) The story and characters didn't really have depth, but then there wasn't room in the book for depth between all of the random events that happened. Beyond that - it left the texture of the colour of liver in my brain (not the texture of liver, the texture of the colour), and I'm not sure I would read it again.
My only suggestion is that people read the first page and judge from that whether it's the sort of thing they would enjoy. Conveniently, I've reproduced the first page for you below!
So yes. My opinion on this book is something of a resounding meh, mainly because if I try to form a strong opinion on it one way or the other my head starts hurting.
If you liked this...
... Try some of Steve Aylett's other stuff! I believe that I've read Atom, which I found amusing enough to read chunks of it aloud.
The Review: This book was chosen to be my forfeit book, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to review it. Only An Alligator is the literary equivalent of a magic eye painting - you have to unfocus your brain and let it wash over you, otherwise there is no way to get through this book. By which I mean that the blurb is probably the clearest description of what is supposed to be happening in this book that you will get from it. No, really.
I enjoy the premise of Only An Alligator - a young man pisses off a demon by accident, the demon gets the (very, very mistaken) impression that this man is a genius plotting against him, and everyone who isn't the demon is blissfully unaware of any of the attacks and schemes against them. I enjoy the ideas of it - everyone having a statue that's linked to their life, floor-lobster that breed where there's corruption, a city grown from spores. It quite funny - sometimes from an aspect of the world building, sometimes from the ridiculous situations people end up in, sometimes from their reactions to the same (most of them being acceptance of this as normal), sometimes from Bread Eggs Milk Squick and the reverse Oh Wait This Is My Grocery List. (Fair Warning: links go to TV Tropes. Click at your own peril.) The story and characters didn't really have depth, but then there wasn't room in the book for depth between all of the random events that happened. Beyond that - it left the texture of the colour of liver in my brain (not the texture of liver, the texture of the colour), and I'm not sure I would read it again.
My only suggestion is that people read the first page and judge from that whether it's the sort of thing they would enjoy. Conveniently, I've reproduced the first page for you below!
1: The Idiot
Enthusiasm and coherence don't always go together.
Maybe it was the mascara in the spaniel's eyes, or just dumb luck. Either way Barney was playing with fire. As they passed the scary glare of the creepchannel entrance, the dog began laughing so hard the mascara was blotching with tears and Barney knelt to check it out. Behind him, sour light needled from the creepchannel mouth like a drench of ice and vinegar.
And the dog Help had always been a strange one. He could shuffle all his fur down to one end of his body, sit upright in a chair like a human, whistle after women, and attack anyone who started singing in a sprightly manner. He'd clamp his jaws and hold on, looking up at you silent and rueful of this unwanted intimacy. His ears turned blue and flowed like water. The butter-wouldn't-melt mischief of his species had reached its pinnacle with Help. So it was no great surprise to Barny when he slipped his leash and did a runner into the stewing vortex.
Kicking through emeralds, Barny ascended the little slope, passed a beached and tilted grandfather clock and entered the demonic transit system. Of course, he was instantly assailed by searing pain, stickled spinelight and corrosive etheric bile, but he was thinking about his dad's birthday. Pa Juno had been complaining about some undulant psychic parasite in his shack. Classic poltergeist activity and everyone was sure it was the ghost of his hair come back to mock him.
So yes. My opinion on this book is something of a resounding meh, mainly because if I try to form a strong opinion on it one way or the other my head starts hurting.
If you liked this...
... Try some of Steve Aylett's other stuff! I believe that I've read Atom, which I found amusing enough to read chunks of it aloud.
April 18, 2010
review soon- What an amazing book!
February 3, 2012
You either love or hate Steve Aylett's fiction. (That is, if you've ever heard of him. He's one of the most overlooked authors publishing today.)
I love it, so 5 stars.
I love it, so 5 stars.
December 2, 2012
This book charmed the chrome off me.
September 5, 2015
I loved the Accomplice series and I have no idea why.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews