Jennifer, you probably haven’t heard of Jeff Noon before because his stories tend to make people uncomfortable, or they offend them, I don’t know. He’s one of those cult writers—you love them or you hate them. In Vurt, there are characters that have sex with their sister, others have sex with dogs, all of them are on drugs all the time—junkies to the point that most of them have no quarrel with getting high by chewing chunks of flesh they knife off a poor thing from another world (I don’t recall what the proper term for the creature was), even though they know it hurts it and the thing is supposed to be precious and cherished in that place where it came from. And stuff. I was young when I read it. I enjoyed it, thought it was racy. But I know a few people who read it and were not pleased.

I’ve bought at least ten copies of Ammonite over the years, because I keep giving them away to people I believe will benefit from reading it. The one copy I purchased of Vurt is still the one I have—I only felt the impulse to give it away once, to a kid from a writing workshop who was interested in Bizzaro fiction. But I was too lazy to dig the book out from wherever I kept it, so instead I seized the chance to make him take away all my Carlton Mellick III stuff. What a relief!

I found Vurt quite entertaining and racy, but it didn’t haunt my dreams for years, nor did it same my life the way Ammonite did. So, there. Good karina. Bad judges.