In the tradition of Irvine Welsh (with whom he shares a publisher) and other faux rebel regionalists, Niall Griffiths gives us the story of Ianto, the "inbred, ignoble savage" living in the Welsh mountains, who has lost his ancestral hovel and now plots revenge on, predictably enough, the English yuppies who have set up a holiday home in his grandmother's old cottage.
It makes for a fluent and powerful read but there is something by now very familiar, and catch-a-trend, about the wasteland drinking sessions, the lurid imagery and graphically described violence, not to mention the endless expletives and embittered sexual banter about Hollywood and contemporary pop stars. After a long, guttural exchange about sexual appendages, one character pipes up to scold her fellow drinkers for their preoccupation with "genitals", a curiously precise word which makes one wonder about the authenticity, or rather synthenticity, of it all. Descriptions of the wind-lashed landscape are strong and affecting but, as with the awful title, there is a sense that the whole thing is striving self-consciously to shock and depress. "Stinking stairwells", "needles beaded with bad blood" - the images are very familiar.
"A wild pet for the super cultivated" was how T.S. Eliot described William Blake's effect on the literary drawingrooms of London. Radical chic has never been more in fashion and, for present day London, such pets are to be found in "the regions"; the more dysfunctional, derelict and impenetrable in dialect, the better.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist and critic