Steve Aylett's prose messes with the reader's mind, on many levels. Clichés are absurdly literalized. Similes and metonymies turn themselves inside out. Seemingly flat statements of fact burst into cascades of mind-boggling associations. Parodies of hard-boiled-detective prose turn commonplace assumptions on their heads. Strange premises ("more murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature") lead inexorably to ultra-violent conclusions.

All this makes Aylett's novel The Crime Studio read like the The Stranger's "Police Beat" column on acid. The book's content perfectly matches its style. The novel is basically a series of deadpan comic vignettes of bizarre crimes. It's the first of three books by Aylett to be set in Beerlight, an American city of the future whose entire economy seems to be based upon burglaries, assassinations, and random bursts of gunfire.

In the course of The Crime Studio, we meet such characters as Brute Parker, proprietor of the city's all-night gun store, who is as likely as not to kill you with whatever weapon you are trying to buy from him; Billy Panacea, "burglar extraordinaire," who commits his crimes more for aesthetic impact than financial gain; Harpoon Specter, con man and shyster lawyer, who wreaks havoc with his twisted pleas in court; and Henry Blince, the fat chief of police, whose ingenious theories, devised to frame innocent people, always involve food found at the scene of the crime, and are foiled only by his inveterate habit of unwittingly eating all the evidence.

All in all, this (together with Aylett's other novels) is the most hilarious book I have read in years. But what gets to me most of all about The Crime Studio is still its prose style. The only thing more unsettling than the derangement and delirium depicted in these pages is the cool lucidity, ironic concision, and rigorous, almost abstract logic with which Aylett displays it all to us. STEVEN SHAVIRO