Stephen Stelfox, a talent spotter for a major record label, is going very quickly insane. His job consists of picking which of the ‘one GCSE merchants’ (the artists) will have a hit record with the ‘animals’ (the public).
These decisions are almost always made drunk from an Eastern European brothel, and the hits are drying up. Stelfox’s recent attempts at success (including a German electro pop number called ‘Why Don’t You Smack My Ass?’) ended in disaster.
His mind is like ‘a Mission with no Control.’ As the title suggests, Stelfox’s insanity and rising bloodlust is going to end badly for his nearest and dearest.
John Niven’s debut novel draws on the writer’s own experience as an A&R man in the late nineties, and its this semi fictional memoir form that’s perhaps the most enjoyable aspect to Kill Your Friends. Britpop’s at its peak, Girl Power’s just kicked off, and New Labour’s election victory is only a few months away. Niven deftly uses ironic retrospection; the reader cannot help but be amused by Stelfox’s opinion that Be Here Now is Oasis’ masterpiece, that OK Computer will end Radiohead’s career, and the description of Tony Blair as ‘that Labour guy.’
It’s a disappointment, then, that the rest of the novel is so derivative and, ultimately, boring. Niven’s stabs at postmodernism are clumsy and ineffectual, and the surreal, stream-of-consciousness dialogues begin to grate. Similarly, Stelfox’s casual racism, and not-so-casual sexism, don’t shock because they’re so contrived. It becomes obvious within about five lines of Kill Your Friends that Niven is hugely inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’ own bloody satire, American Psycho, and it is this debt that ultimately prevents the book from having an existence of its own. Mockney lads’ culture is not as interesting, or as fitting a target for satire as eighties Wall Street, and the novel’s progression from nostalgic memoir to murderous rampage is a mistake from which Kill Your Friends never fully recovers from.
2 stars out of 5
