‘Nothing important ever got decided in a meeting…’
It’s tough to judge something on its own merit when it wears its influences so boldly on its sleeve. Kill Your Friends, the debut novel from Scottish writer John Niven, is so clearly indebted to both American Psycho and the writing of Irvine Welsh that parts of it are tantamount to plagiarism. It is also one of the most cynical books I’ve ever read and one that exists in a world completely devoid of hope or redemption…
Set in 1997, at the height of Britpop, Kill Your Friends is written from the point of view of Steven Stelfox, an A & R agent at a big, London-based record company. Our protagonist doesn’t really care about the music (although he’s very knowledgeable about it) and he happens to also be a psychopath (which is one of the reasons he has become so successful). Stelfox fucks, snorts and murders his way across the music scene with reckless abandon in what is a gleefully unhinged takedown of the both the music industry and of ’90s culture generally.
While Trainspotting is an easy comparison, Kill Your Friends is actually closer to Filth – one of Welsh’s most repugnant novels. Stelfox is a dead ringer for Bruce Robertson, the deranged protagonist of that novel, and as with Filth, your enjoyment of Kill Your Friends will depend on how keen you are to spend a few hours in the company of a protagonist who is unrelentingly racist, misogynist and unkind. Stelfox has no redeeming characteristics, and this becomes grating, even upsetting after a while. What I will say, however, is that Niven’s description of day long drug binges and the subsequent hangovers that follow them is as vivid and visceral as anything that Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote on the subject, and there were passages within this novel that genuinely made me feel am almost palpable sense of anxiety.
If you can stomach American Psycho and Welsh and Thompson, and all the rest of the influences here, or if you are interested in the Britpop era (or all of the above), Kill Your Friends is worth connecting with. Be warned though, this kind of book is what the phrase ‘not for the faint hearted’ was created for.