The Velocity Gospel

Accomplice #2

by Steve Aylett

A tropic of slack jawed nutters where Justice is as rare as a jelly fossil. Where angel refineries stand like gravestones and rotten hearts are piled in the sabotage yard. A home for the socket faced masses.

And Barny Juno. A man so desperate to get rid of Magenta Blaze, so that he can be with Chloe Low, that he’s willing to go to the shaman Beltane Carom for advice.

Obsessed by Chloe, Juno doesn’t realise that the demonic insect king Sweeney is after him again - sending the demon Skittermite to `aggravate him unto death’.

Using Mayor Rudloe’s latest drive towards a state of constant readiness, his root and branch review and clamour of ear-grinding excuses Skittermite plans to understand the way of things, blend in and imitate. Then the horror . . .

Accomplice: the literary equivalent of digging a shallow hole, doing a headstand in it and claiming you’re wearing the world as a hat.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Bizarro Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Steve 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.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having survived the assault on the senses that comprises the first book of the Accomplice series, the wary reader will find this one a little calmer, dare I say a little more comprehensible. At times, Aylett even allows himself a half-line of something that looks, from a certain angle, a little like plot development or exposition, which by comparison with the foregoing seems positively hand-holding.

In this book, the demon world continues its arbitrary vendetta against Barny Juno and his pals, who come across as something like the Goonies if the Goonies had suffered a series of disfiguring accidents and then been forced to recite Beckett in silly voices. More attention is paid to Barny's rotund, sad-sack friend Gregor, who once again, Aylett says, has ‘eaten his luck like a tie spooned up with the morning cereal’. Having been fired by the mysterious Sorting Office, Gregor finds a new job as a door-to-door salesman:

Gregor's pitch began well due to his looking bulby and distorted through door peepholes and then looking exactly the same when people opened the door.

The action advances through Aylett's usual cryptic and non-sequiturial epigrams (‘A camel cannot be impressed’; ‘Progress accelerates downhill’) blended with bizarro Tartarean landscapes, although his register also finds room for touches of music-hall routine—

‘Had an argument with the landlady. My rent was in arrears.’
‘Why put it in her ears?’

—as well as portentous declamation:

He looked out the mossy window, mouth pursed like a fist. ‘It's as I suspected. The sun, rising at an angle, has inflicted another morning upon us all.’ He shook his head dismally.

Through the insanity, something like a theme begins to bubble up, concerning the structures and abuses of power, symbolised in Accomplice by the cartoonishly corrupt Mayor Rudloe. Surveying Rudloe's domain, riven by inequalities, one demon notes with relish that the only thing distinguishing it from Hell is ‘the pretense that it makes sense’. He might be talking about the book itself, which is, in summary, aggressively baffling.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

To understand the logic of chaos in the Accomplice world is rather like sitting on top of a pile of stuffed penguins eating haddock pie and singing 'Oh My Darling Clementine' forty times. This of course is perfectly rational behaviour so long as your pie does not get cold in the process; that would be odd.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a sequel to 'Only an Alligator', this continues in the same absolutely crazy but brilliantly written way. I must confess it took me a couple of chapters to understand a word of what Aylett was saying, but once you slip into his mode of thinking and tip your mind at a tangent to our current dimension, it all begins to make sense. You realize that Aylett has not just created a strange world populated by slightly buffoon-like characters, but has beautifully crafted an entire dimension, where things work in other ways from what we are used to.

Incredibly imagined, lovingly crafted, and as a sequel, perfectly worthy, this book further explores the dizzying land of Accomplice.

This series will prove to be one of the most avant-garde of the generation, and doesn't just move fantasy to a new level, it invents a new carpark and supplies you with an extra piece of brain necessary to ride the creepchannel to this etheric infection.

[Hokomoko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aylett again offers a slim anti-heroic drama filled with the bizarre and perverse characters. Set in a kind of hell-on-earth, humans are often more perplexing and horrible than demons. Much of the novel is written in, or refer to brilliant "aphorisms" that kill me. My favorite
was 'progress accelerates downhill.'

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

And the beat goes on. Lovely series. I read random lines to a subliterate housemate and it made him read. So I say: if you've never read anything before, start with the Accomplice series. Good food.