Book review: Pandaemonium, by Christopher Brookmyre

Published on Saturday 8 August 2009 16:44

PANDAEMONIUM Christopher Brookmyre Little, Brown, £17.99. Review: DAVID LEASK

EVERY good writer, they say, has his demons. Christopher Brookmyre has hunners of the bams. There are the big ones and the small ones and the really nasty pitchfork-toting, Latin-speaking, teenager-crucifying, heidbummer ones. And they are all headed through an interdimensional anomaly into a good bookstore near you.

Scotland's favourite writer of comic thriller romps, you see, has flipped. His genre, that is. His latest novel – Pandaemonium, his 13th – is a spectacularly, sometimes marvellously, silly low-budget sci-fi horror flick of a book.

At a secret experimental military installation deep in the Scottish Highlands, an uneasy alliance of scientists, the US military and mysterious Vatican types have opened the gates of what they think might be Hell.

Cue, for my liking, way too much undergraduate philosophising on life, the universe and everything before Brookmyre gets down to the proper action of demon attacks. The big nasty beasties pretty quickly scoff the massed ranks of American grunts guarding their lair. So they hunt new prey. And make a big mistake. They decide to pounce on one of those trendy Highland outdoor centres, home, for a few days, to a busload of hormone-overloaded Scottish teenagers undergoing grief counselling after a school stabbing.

Here Brookmyre is at his best. His angsty teens are terrifically funny – bursting into the story, as he puts it, like a bottle of ginger popping open after a long journey.

These kids are way better trained for demon-fighting than the US military. After all, they've spent years honing their skills in Doom II. Boys and girls turn out to be dab hands at dispatching the behorned ones with wisecracking, swearing-rich relish. "Aye, yous better run, ya Hun-looking b*****ds," one, presumably Celtic-supporting, school hardman tells fleeing demons.

But the youngsters are great even before they set about their enemies. The boys start off with a time-honoured adolescent game. "Wid'ye?" they ask each other, pointing at each girl in their group in turn and listing her pros and cons. Most settle that they "wid". Wid'ye do Christopher Brookmyre's Pandaemonium? Aye. It's not God's gift. But you probably wid.

Christopher Brookmyre is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 26 August, 8pm