The Citizen Kane of Bad Taste. There's so much evil energy in this book, if it moved next door to you you'd probably get cancer within a week! In the long-awaited sequel to David Britton's first novel, Lord Horror (and Savoy's contender for the 1996 Booker Prize for Fiction) the great horror of modern history is absorbed into the framework of Surrealism, literary fantasy and the darkest children's fiction. By viewing the Holocaust as a tragicomic carnival of the grotesque, the author offers the reader a vivid, dream-level identification with the era of efficient barbarism. A terrain of unfettered imagination, written to the glorious edgy, spooky, intense, mad, weird Rock'n'Roll and Rhythm'n'Blues music of the 1950s, from a series of tapes compiled for David Britton by the legendary Roger Eagle. Roger provided us with the best and most obscure down home Blues, Rockabilly, Hilly-Country and Rockin' instrumentals from that seething decade. His experience and unrivalled musical library helped reinforce the musical motifs that run through Motherfuckers. Clubman and DJ extraordinaire, Roger was a friend of ours for thirty years. A word to the wise: Roger was owner The Magic Village Club in Manchester and helped form the Punk movement of the '70s with his seminal Liverpool club, Eric's. As a promoter he brought to Britain many Blues performers (Bo Diddley, LaVern Baker, Screamin' Jay Hawkins) and a number of Jamaican artists, particularly Lee 'Scratch' Perry. "A bizarre and outrageous confection of riotous, Rabelaisian imagery it may be, but Motherfuckers does offer a consistent view of fascism. This is also the terrain of unfetted imagination; where the macabrely-detailed dreamscape of Lautréamont and Sade meet the popular common-sense fantasy of L. Frank Baum and Roald Dahl. The book draws on the fantastic current in English writing (the gothic, Swift, Carroll, Hodgson, Graham, Ballard) but there's a strong input from the more specifically continental transgressors, both social and textual, Huysman, Bataille and Céline. Motherfuckers is a truly frightening book. Julian Petley, The New Statesman.