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Back in the USSA
Kim Newman & Eugene Byrne
Mark V Ziesing, hardback, 334 pages, $29.95/£17.95
Reviewed from proof copy, now published
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

‘The United Socialist States of America doesn’t have a culture, so what would be the point of a cultural attaché?’

It’s probably unfair to claim something the same in the real world, but any culture that celebrates the greasy bonhomie of Friends as high art is one destined to miss a joke or several in Back In The USSA. Like co-author and self-confessed smartarse Kim Newman, it’s the sort of book that relies on knowing too much about everything. Especially the minutia of tatty Brit sit-coms.

This is a collection of lengthy shared world shorts that finds Newman and Byrne holding a funfair mirror to the century and photographing the gnarled but still recognisable results. In this universe, for example, it’s Al Capone who assumed the White House and America that capitulated to the sweet seductions of Communism. You can look for John Reed’s ten world shaking days in the States. You can gasp as Houdini dies saving other passengers from the stricken Titanic. You can watch I Married a Capitalist or I Was a Capitalist for the FBI. (That’s Federal Bureau of Ideology.) Dennis Potter can lead the Labour Party and, scarily, Jean-Luc Godard gets the French Presidency.

In Europe time moves on and we must spare a thought for the poor British squaddies caught up in that terrible Indochina business. The brilliant ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ is Newman and Byrne at their most ambitious, and forms the book’s centrepiece. Bob’s been to war and come back with a book inside him. A book that would make a great film, a film that, if made, could save the blighted career of the once great but now disgraced Michael Powell. And make it he does, complete with helicopter gunships Tannoying ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, and blitzing enemy villages. Imagine the ’Nam oeuvre of Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick staffed by the cast of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?

A book like this depends on its invention, and the quality of invention here is top notch. ‘Tom Joad’ is Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing with the Untouchable Elliot Ness instead of Bruce Willis. ‘Citizen Ed’, against all the odds, reinvents Ed Gein as a Socialist Hero of the Revolution, repeatedly freed to go about his fiendish business in a society that has proved scientifically that mass murder is impossible under the red flag. It’s a heady and dazzling piece of Grand Guignol whimsy.

It doesn’t all work. ‘Abdication Street’ is clever but over long, and just once in a while you do wonder if this pair ain’t just tossing in names for the sake of it. But not often, and not at the expense of the flow. And besides, it’s easy to love a book that gifts us Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Nutter: ‘Lithuanian star Larushka Skikne as a young man who keeps the mummified corpse of his mother (Margaret Rutherford) in the attic of his boarding house in Skegness.’

No really, it is. •

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