author:
JOHN NIVEN

Fiction
352 pages
Harper Perennial

Not for the faint hearted, easily offended, or politically correct, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends is as much a vision of depravity and self-obsession as I’ve ever read, and deserves comparison to American Psycho. The 1990s British music industry is the setting for the novel, which uses months as its chapters and begins each with a report on successful records and professional movements.

Niven’s narrator is one Steven Stelfox, an A&R man for a big record company. Despite mounting debts and a lack of successful acts, Stelfox is moved to do very little actual work to change his situation. What he is willing to do is to drug and murder those who threaten to make him look bad. Despite the title, Stelfox is no one’s friend. He briefly wonders if the forced domesticity associated with having a girlfriend might be helpful in taming his penchant for cocaine and prostitutes, but dismisses the prospect when he remembers that this would require conversation. Women want so much to talk. This is a problem.

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author:
TIM WINTON

Fiction
224 pages
FSG

Still water runs deep, it’s said, whereas the kind of water one surfs—curling, glass-walled water, a hollow of serenity tucked inside a roaring snarl—apparently runs turbulently and dangerously over shark-populated reefs. On the fraught knife-edge between surface and turmoil is where characters live in Tim Winton’s Breath, a lean and taut novel with prose that crests and crashes in impressive resonance with its promising but ultimately tragic subjects.

Bruce Pike, the novel’s narrator, and Loonie, his best friend (yes, he’s pretty loony), ride their bikes to the Australian coast and discover surfing. “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful,” Bruce writes, “Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.” And it’s not long before Bruce and Loonie are both hooked by the rush and smitten by Sanbo, a veteran of worldwide big waves, who takes the boys under his wing and takes their boards under his beach house.

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author:
WARREN ELLIS

illustration:
IVAN RODRIGUEZ

Graphic Novel
216 pages
Avatar Press

Warren Ellis’s work can do strange things to genres. In some cases, it serves as rock-solid examples of the form—his long-running Transmetropolitan, for example, in the realm of political science fiction. For others, there’s deconstruction afoot: witness Planetary, which explores and critiques a century of pulp heroics even as it serves as a fine example of the same; or the more recent Aetheric Mechanics, which starts out as a sort of steampunk Sherlock Holmes pastiche and evolves into something much more ominous. In recent years, Ellis has turned his attention to the detective story, with the 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein and the ongoing comics Fell and Desolation Jones. More recently, he’s again taken on ongoing, large-scale science fiction with the online FreakAngels, with artist Paul Duffield, and Doktor Sleepless, with artist Ivan Rodriguez.

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author:
CHRIS ONSTAD

Graphic Novel
104 pages
Dark Horse

Opening with a pitch meeting for bawdy cell-phone accessories and closing with abundant amounts of liquor consumed in a Greek restaurant, the humor on display in Chris Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight ranges from surreal to blue to slapstick. Achewood has been running online since 2001, and has already garnered its share of acclaim in that space. Rather than Onstad’s previous, self-released collections, The Great Outdoor Fight expands on the online version both through additions to the storyline and through a wealth of supplemental information.

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