Darkness visible

Although the title of this book, Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid, might sound like it's a particularly in-your-face American self-help sort of cruel-to-be-kind thing, it's actually a book of stories by a British writer. This is Tibor Fischer's fourth book: His first, Under The Frog, was shortlisted for the Booker, won the Betty Trask Award, and earned him a slot in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1993.

The title of this book is a good, attention-grabbing, feckless one, and Fischer is clever with titles. Some of the stories inside are: "I Like Being Killed"; "Ice Tonight in the Hearts of the Young Vistors"; and "Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger".

Fischer is interested - perhaps even obsessed - by the marginalised of society, and of those who have become victims through war, or by somehow falling through the pavements of ordinary life to the sewers that lie unseen beneath our feet like pulsating eels.

"Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors" could have come as a piece of reportage out of an issue of Granta, being the account of a journalist's attempt to get across the Romanian border from Hungary in the wretched aftermath of the Revolution, which doubles as a meditation on hell. "I Like Being Killed" is a novella about a struggling comedian called Miranda, whose descent into mania is so subtle you don't notice until both yourself and the protaganist are hurtling together towards a messy ending.

Elsewhere, there's a veritable cast of losers, chancers, sex-maniacs, serial killers, prisoners, drop-outs, folk bent on self-destruction: darkness seeps from frenetic story to story. Both language and style are arresting, but the composite effect is about the same as being belted over and over again on top of the initial bruise. Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid? No, more like, Don't Read This Book If You Don't Want To Feel Down.

Rosita Boland is a writer, journalist and critic