Hot on the heels of John Lancaster's The Debt to Pleasure, a clever, amusing yarn about an insane foodie serial killer, came poet Burnside's equally clever and far nastier debut. With that superficial stylishness so beloved of British reviewers, this novel is simply an offensive book. "No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world," announces Luke, the narrator. From watching the death throes of a poisoned mouse, he soon progresses to lying naked and perfumed by the side of his dead mother and on to breaking the fingers of the mute child of a woman he has sex with while she feigns trances. Elsewhere he severs the larynx of the babies born to his next sexual partner. This is a smugly repulsive book glorifying in its sensationalist amorality, which does nothing for its limited artistic merit.
