People have been praising Robert Rankin quite a bit. When I read "Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls", however, I wasn't that impressed, in fact I found his writing style irritating.

After "Snuff Fiction", I realise that this was perhaps not typical of Rankin. In "Snuff Fiction" there is less of an accent on what I feared would be his trademark style forms, though there is still plenty of repetition and running jokes.

"Snuff Fiction" is the story of the Doveston, a guy that more or less changed the world in an alternate history of the end of our 20th century. Not too surprisingly, this story features a total power outage at midnight of December 31st 1999, plummeting the whole world into chaos and disorder. The 'snuff' the title refers to is the stuff that people put up their nostrils, in fact the book chronicles the Doveston's search for the perfect snuff.

There's plenty of gags, the book reads like a breeze, it's quite enjoyable, but not much more than that. There's quite a few moments of genuine laughter that save this book where "Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls" wasn't. The ending is really quite chaotic and does fall back to the style forms I so disliked (refer to the other book's review if you want to know). Not a bad book at all, but there's a lot that's better.

Released 1999, ISBN 0-552-14590-4

RK

Written June 2000

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