A generous reading would pitch Niven’s pulpy debut novel, 2008’s Kill Your Friends, as a satire of New Labour opportunism. Drawing on his experiences as an A&R man, it is set during the late 90s music industry boom and features the proudly offensive A&R man Steven Stelfox, who is driven to murder in order to crush the competition. It’s a poor man’s American Psycho, revelling in saying the so-called unsayable, with a particular fondness for metaphors based around anal rape.
A decade later, and 20 years on from Britpop, Stelfox returns in Kill ’Em All, now inevitably a Trump admirer and thriving in an era of chaos. Rich after developing an X Factor-style show, he’s living the high life as a music “consultant”, amusing himself by running sockpuppet Twitter accounts from his private jet. But a major label associate has a problem. There is footage of Lucius Du Pre – an infantile yet calculatingly paedophilic star with shades of Michael Jackson – sexually abusing a teenage boy. Stelfox suggests they fake the singer’s death, bribe the boy’s parents then restore Du Pre to glory.
Kill ’Em All isn’t so much a narrative as a human centipede of topical news grafted together to maximise shock value. The 90s version of Stelfox observed that once you’ve called a woman a slut in bed, there’s nowhere left to go. After the gratuitous rape fantasies and murder of Kill Your Friends, Niven grinds out gratuitous descriptions of pederasty. Yet considering that Kill ’Em All climaxes in a parachute-abetted kidnapping from an exploding helicopter, the book is impressively dull.
At least Kill Your Friends, told entirely from Stelfox’s perspective, took on a kind of monomaniacal rhythm; handling an ensemble cast of lawyers, doctors and paedophiles proves beyond Niven’s skill. His inaccurate longueurs about the industry slow an already predictable narrative. (As in the previous book, Stelfox plants incriminating material on someone’s computer to do them over.) And although this novel has all the literary complexity of the blurb on a Lynx can, Niven constantly overexplains in case readers can’t follow – though readers young enough to struggle probably shouldn’t be reading this. An epilogue details Stelfox’s unedifying comments on #MeToo – but the weak, moralistic twist undermines Niven’s cruel intentions.
• Kill ’Em All is published by William Heinemann. To order a copy for £14.61 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
