EIBF: Pandaemonium!

Tuesday, 17th August

I must confess, not having read any of Christopher Brookmyre’s novels, I had no idea what I was in for. Expecting a dull crime fiction writer to talk about plot development—as if it were some 1^st year undergraduate creative writing course—I could not have been more mistaken.

Brookmyre was funnier than most comedians I have seen at the Fringe this year, and certainly generated more laughs from the crowd. His attitude to literature, in his words, is one of “awe… aw for fuck’s sake, stop making it so hard!”

He combines genres of crime, gothic, horror, and sci-fi, with a twist of his own Brookmyrian zest, to produce something quite bizarre. “I must be very closely in touch with my inner teen,” he said, explaining how the pop culture we ingest as teenagers stays with us in quite profound ways through our adulthood.

Brookmyre’s novels are subsequently both profound, yet extremely accessible – he dryly described his latest novel Pandaemonium! as a gothic horror story, as opposed to just a horror story, "...because there are goths in it.” He proceeded to read an extract from this book, which could aptly be described as a side-splittingly hilarious anti-religious rant.

If an organization of atheist missionaries were to mass-distribute one book to all the institutions of organized religion around the world—forget Dawkins—this would be it. What’s more is that, through the medium of his characters and fiction, Brookmyre was entirely capable of getting away with being ludicrously offensive, and even having a predominantly middle-aged audience gasping for breath through their laughter.