Before reading this book I would have listed Christopher Fowler as one of my favourite authors. Roofworld, Psychoville, Disturbia, Spanky, the short stories... all wonderful. OK so there was Rune, but everyone's allowed one little mistake.

Then along comes Soho Black, a book so bad that it almost leaves me speechless. It took me some several months and many attempts to finish. I certainly wouldn't have bothered ploughing through it were it not for the purpose of review.

I've complained before about books that have too little story. This one has too much. For the first half dozen or so chapters Fowler keeps throwing apparently unrelated plotlines at the reader. We're given: a couple of dodgy types sitting in a van discussing films, a script about a superhero elephant, a producer getting fired, a bizarre murder involving butterflies, a woman sitting in her flat waiting to die... All very interesting, but too much. None have any obvious connection. The reader is mentally screaming "stop!" It's impossible to get any sort of grip on what the real story actually is. Perhaps worse, it's impossible to tell which characters are going to be the major ones about whom we should care. It's just a mess.

Some sort of story does eventually begin to emerge - a "trip into the life of a failing film producer whose unexpected death puts his career back on track" - but it remains confused. It's far too knowingly clever, more interested in form than content. For instance, the book ends with a "review" of the film of the book! (From which I extracted that story summary).

To be fair, the pieces do come together eventually, but it all seems rather forced and to be honest I'd long since given up caring.

Given Fowler's track record one has to believe that there is more to this than merely a bad book. There must be a concept lurking somewhere. Some (all?) of the chapters are presumably intended as scenes from bad film scripts of the type that Fowler sees in real life - I mean, a pair of cops called "Bryant and May" can not be taken seriously. But so what? What is Fowler getting at?

Is it a searing attack on the film industry? A parody of Soho life? One huge inside joke? A parting two fingers to the horror genre? Is it so post fucking modern that it's crawled up its own arse and died?

Whatever Fowler's intent it doesn't work. Avoid.