Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Rating:
Summary: Psychotic Genius Writes Stupendous Yarns
Review: A Rock of Crack As Big As The Ritz, now there's social realism. Journalism may make you feel sorry for people, but Will Self makes you understand people. You understand their pain, their reasons, there failings, and their successes. The other stories in this collection are almost just as perfect as the first one. Read them all. Read them to your children.

A lot of people don't like Will Self, but a lot of people like smoking cigarettes. A lot of people are stupid.

Remember, reading Will Self makes you illustrious.

Rating:
Summary: Various Self
Review: This is a short story collection by Self, and is a hit-and-miss affair. The collection is bracketed by two stories concerning black drug dealers in London: there is an element of fantasy in the first, "The Rock of Crack as big as the Ritz", and a tale of injustice and imprisonment in "The Nonce Prize".

In between, there are six stories of varying quality. "Flytopia", in which a man forms an alliance with insects in his house is great fun, and the title story is welll-written, but the rest of the stories I found forgettable.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: Better without the gimmicks
Review: Will Self borrows a gimmick used by Kafka, Borges, and in one not-very-succesful story by Fitzgerald (A Diamond as Big as the Ritz) and, to some extent, used in all science fiction. An impossible or supernatural event is treated naturalistically, or accepted deadpan without comment by the characters.(Isaac Asimov Magazine stories do this well).
Another trademark, reminiscent of the dirty Scottish shock-writers, is descriptions of drug and alcohol use from the point of view of the user. He also favors effects that used to be called Grand Guignol and are now called splatterpunk.
These devices are used as the hinges of his plots and the entertainment values of his stories often depends on how compelling you find them. Apart from them he is a witty and perceptive satirist with some wonderful prose such as his description of the small Suffolk town "landlocked by the shifting dunes of social trends" where "the landlords of the three desultory pubs on the main street drew pints for themselves in the cool, brown, afternoon interiors of their establishments."