With these short tales, all set in the mythic, iconic city of Beerlight, Aylett tears the masks from laws and justice, to lay bare the inherent nastiness of mankind. Yet he does so with extreme irony and sense of humor, lulling the reader into a state of giddy anticipation as each story builds and builds and explodes.

Aylett is an angry man, I think. His postmodern punk attitude informs all of his writing, from The Crime Studio to Shamanspace, and that's a good thing. Each of the 27 stories included here is like a bullet, aiming straight for the heart of American culture. Beerlight is a lot like most American cities, but boiled down to their essential natures -- I couldn't help picturing Detroit in all its grimy glory. And yet, the characters that populate Beerlight (Brute Parker, Auto-Rhino, Leon Wardial, Billy Panacea and all the rest) are torn straight from Dickens, behaving like Raymond Chandler's characters all strung out on smack. Attitude, attitude, dripping everywhere...

Satire is the name of the game in Aylett's Beerlight stories, and though the language may seem simplistic and the tone may seem light, it's anything but. Aylett is a master of the shotgun sentence, and each word in each sentence is a carefully-timed bit of buckshot. For example:

"Eddie was a gaunt, Perkinsesque obsessive. He swore he heard rats in the walls. Maybe the communal rat had taken his advice and bred -- maybe the whole family was ballistic. And every week Ivo came snaffling up and waved a bit of phlegm-soaked paper at him, covered in scrawl. Didn't Ivo understand this was the tenement where god had died? That its destruction was a service to life-loving men and women everywhere?"

The stories in The Crime Studio are not for the faint-of-heart. They're cold, brutal and barren. Their richness lies in Aylett's compelling grip on human nature and the desire for revenge. Somebody ran into your car? Why not go out and torch them and their children? That'd be the Beerlight thing to do...

So sit back, enjoy the hallucinations, and when you come up for air, you'll know that Aylett has succeeded in creating a volume of stories that begs to be read again and again.