Wherein the Bad Boy of British Literature (© tabloid hacks, pusillanimous broadsheet editors) offers a twist on familiar riffs. Will Self's new collection is lazy only in that four of its eight tales have appeared elsewhere. Otherwise, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys is not so much a single step and a giant leap forward.

Much of the Brit-Lit or Cult Fiction (marketing tag enough for Capital Spurs) foisted upon us is cheap shock. I don't have to name names; these books are about juggling a stash of familiar Gen X tropes: drugs, death, club culture. You buy into the shock-HORROR just as easily as the Mail boards any train marked Lolita or Mary Bell. It's a game: half-smart-lad hip-trip author shows us his arse and we in turn pretend to be grateful. Self might have corkscrewed his insectoid frame around the tar-brush, but he's been splashed in his time. You don't do heroin on a Tory campaign plane and collect your £200 on passing GO.

But that's no more where Tough Tough Boys operates than it was true of My Idea of Fun or Grey Area, and arguably only 'Flytopia' even belongs to the old Self, with its cottage beset by beneficent smart bugs, talking via formations of their numerous exoskeletel selves. It's a story about insanity, of course, told through Burroughsian metaphor; Self would be the first to admit as much. He's a satirist. And a risk taker. How else to explain 'Design Faults in The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual' - a gemlike sometimes-a-cigar-is-just-a-cigar parody of his beloved Crash.

No, even for Self this is a dark, pessimistic collection. Especially about masculinity, especially for the father of several small Selfs. This book is not about laddishness. It reads like an anti-Loaded.

Thus the adults of 'Caring, Sharing' who have delegated their emotions to gigantic baby-like Emotos, feeling everything by proxy. That and the weighty, bullying title story are about people running away. The results are not pretty. Self is suggesting that everything we do - from our clothes to our cars and our relationships - are but self-destructive masks.

The collection is bookended with a matched pair of grim, grimly funny tales. The previously seen 'A Rock of Crack As Big As The Ritz' (from Fitzgerald) has drug-dealer siblings Danny and Tembe expose a rich seam of the drug beneath their north London home and wasting little time in exploiting the opportunities therein. The closing 'The Nonce Prize' revisits them, with Danny set-up by a vicious Jamaican rival, taking the fall as, of all things, a sicko kiddie-killer. In gaol he stumbles onto literature and strangest literary prize of them all. It's grisly comedy, and one of Self's best short stories.

So who comes out of all this best? Self, inevitably, but only as an author. His kind - men, the bettered middle classes - are vain, stupid and driven by instinct. The language this book perches on seems less obtuse, less self-regarding; Self is moving on as a writer. Growing-up. As he leaves the supposed competition in kindergarten, his passage to full adulthood will be a strange and bloody one indeed.