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Personal Demons
Christopher Fowler
Serpent’s Tail paperback, 312 pages, £8.99
Published June 1998
ISBN 1852425970
Soho Black (featuring Bryant and May)
Warner Books paperback, 384 pages, £8.99
Published August 1998 
ISBN 0751525596
Review by Andrew Hedgecock (1998)

Storyteller. Moralist. Joker. Scaremonger. Pasticheur. Psychopathologist. At his best, in books like Disturbia, Spanky and Psychoville, Fowler gives a bravura performance in each of these authorial roles. His short stories have been more uneven, with not quite the subtlety, wit and narrative grip of his novels. But Personal Demons is his most complex and assured collection so far, with compelling plots, emotional resonance, bizarre invention, satire, fantasies, psychological fables and nightmares. Sixteen tales are framed by two manifestos. Fowler’s approach to imaginative literature is outlined in the introduction, and recapitulated as fiction: the closing story illustrates his dislike for mainstream publishing categories and blends comic horror with metafiction; imagine Dr Terror’s House of Horror script-doctored by Thomas Pynchon.

In many ways, Fowler’s fiction resembles the quirky, satirical, peculiarly English films of Lindsay Anderson: there’s the social absurdity, the rejection of genre boundaries, and the conviction that the audience has the intelligence to handle irony, game-playing and the occasional challenge to their expectations. Sadly, Anderson died a disappointed man, having brought a mere handful of film projects to fruition. If you’re baffled by the film industry’s contempt for such talent, and its investment in the inept and unoriginal, the answer is to be found in Soho Black.

Like the early satires of Evelyn Waugh, Soho Black simultaneously condemns and celebrates the author’s milieu; Fowler runs a Soho-based film promotion company. It’s a savage dissection of the moral bankruptcy, stupidity and shallowness of lives out of kilter in the media jungle. But it’s also a eulogy for the curious charm of Soho, the energy and pace of urban life, and the excitement and glamour, however tawdry, of the film business.

The satire, gags and games are held together by a multi-threaded plot that would put William Gibson to shame, and an ensemble of eccentric characters. There are underworld enforcers prowling Soho and discussing bad films; Richard Tyler, a stressed executive, gets a grip on his career after dropping dead in the toilet of a fashionable bar; a lonely artist and the priapic Midas Blake; Glory, stripper and dark spirit of Soho; and the reappearance of geriatric sleuths Bryant and May, investigating the curious case of a corpse and two dozen butterflies. Provocative, macabre and funny.

Reissues:
Soho Black, Warner paperback, 384 pages, published November 1999, ISBN 0751528250
Personal Demons, Serpent's Tail 5 Star, paperback, 320 pages, published November 2001, ISBN 1852427272