BLOW JOB BY STEWART HOME Serpent’s Tail, London 1997

Synopsis
As the leader of Class Justice Steve Drummond has the London anarchist scene "stitched up like a kipper", until "Swift" Nick Carter returns to the political fold. Then the anarchists take on the fascist fringe in a battle for the hearts and minds of disaffected youth.

The Quotes
' "It was a fine afternoon for looting, arson and other forms of wanton destruction," Home writes in this gleefully violent, goofily lewd satire of revolutionary British politics, in which the opposing proponents of anarchism and fascism have more in common than they'd like to admit. Well-known in London as one of Brit lit's lesser, unwashed enfants terribles, Home (Slow Death) envisions a volatile near-future world of street fights, assassinations and bombings perpetrated by socially marginalized members of the No Future Party, the Anglo-Saxon Movement, the Church of Adolf Hitler and other underground factions whose terrorist tactics and Marxist rhetoric appeal to punks and proletariats on the dole. The plot follows try-anything bisexuals Mike Armilus, Steve Drummond and Swift Nick Carter as their constant quests for oral gratification and revolutionary mayhem plunge them into the midst of youth violence in London's slums. Although Home's characters knock Martin Amis (their cultural taste runs more to John Waters), admirers of Amis's patently British nastiness will enjoy Home's fast-paced chronicle of sleazy sex and anarchy.' Publishers Weekly (US)

'He is the most interesting writer to come out of England for quite a while.' Harper's

'Stewart Home is heir to Richard Allen's '70s Skinhead ... revolutionary theory has never been easier to read.' Select

'Relentlessly cliched and driven by a slippery sense of humour, Home's deliberately bad writing does for the novel form what Viz does for the comic strip.' Times Literary Supplement

'The stuff of which cults are made.' Time Out

Trivia about Blow Job
Blow Job was actually written back to back with and immediately after Red London in 1993. Originally AK Press were going to publish the book but for various reasons that never happened. Blow Job was first published in Finland in 1996 as Oppi Tulee Idasta. The Finnish title translates into English as 'Ideology Comes From The East' - and features a fabulous portrait of Karl Marx on the cover. After Blow Job, Home wrote Slow Death which was bought by Serpent's Tail, who immediately asked for a follow up, so they were offered and accepted its less obviously 'commercial' predecessor. When Home told the company he'd finished another novel Come Before Christ & Murder Love after they'd paid an advance for Blow Job, they asked to see that and bought it as well. Blow Job was eventually published in 1997 in the UK after Home's two follow up novels to it had already been issued by Serpent's Tail. Blow Job wasn't published until 1998 in the US.

The jacket for the UK edition was the work of The East End Image Factory who did three great covers for Home's Serpent's Tail books. The first design they did for Blow Job was even better than the redesign requested by Serpent's Tail; it showed the same skinhead whose face is featured on the cover of the published version, but in a body shot. The other covers for Stewart Home books designed by the East End Image Factory were the anthologies Mind Invaders and Suspect Device. One half of the East End Image Factory was photographer and designer Marcel Leilenhof, who also took the photographs used on the front of two Stewart Home covers designed by Erica Smith - No Pity and Red London. A photograph by Leilenhof was also used on the front cover of the Finnish edition of Home's second novel Defiant Pose.

Confusingly, Blow Job was originally titled Suspect Device but Home decided to shift that name onto a fiction anthology he edited for Serpent's Tail. Even more confusingly, Blow Job was at one time a working title for Home's second novel Defiant Pose. The publisher Peter Owen got cold feet about putting out a Home book with the title Blow Job after getting bad reaction from his sales reps, so at the last minute the name was switched back to what had in fact been the original working title for that tome. After the novel came out, Mike Heart of Compendium Bookshop told Home he'd put Blow Job in the window and had scores of people walking in off Camden High Street to buy it who didn't know anything about the book, they were simply attracted by the title. Home went on to have even more problems and greater (anti)-commercial 'success' with the title of his novel Cunt published by Do Not Press in 1999.

Home's avant-garde pornography

Books & Writing

Bibliography

Stewart Home in Hackney, London, 2011. Photos & morph by Chris Dorley Brown.