KILL YOUR FRIENDS

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.

In fact, there isn’t much about mainstream society that Stelfox doesn’t hate. In his extreme instinct toward self-preservation, he’d rather kill a colleague than see them more successful than he is, and he’d certainly kill a person before they could in any way compromise his status quo.

What is to be admired here is Niven’s ability to give us a psycho story that is played out for us from within the screens of our narrator’s mind’s eye. The story speeds by its reader, and before one is even aware of it, a sense of having somehow been an accessory to Stelfox’s crimes has been transmitted. In considering this at length, I realize that I wouldn’t feel as dirty as I do after reading Niven’s Kill Your Friends if it weren’t so based on truth.

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