Anyone who has had the misfortune of trying to explain more difficult elements of contemporary American fiction either to students or outside traditional academic settings will certainly sympathize with the objectives of Kathryn Hume's Aggressive Fictions. Thinking about how we might offer readers thwarted by difficult literary output some sort of lifeline, without distorting texts so they fit some more easily understood framework, is undoubtedly a worthwhile enterprise for anyone interested in the American novel from the 1960s through to the twenty-first century.

Hume begins by defining the author–reader contract, suggesting that there is an implicit relationship in which we come to the text expecting to be both informed and entertained. Her introduction considers how contemporary American authors break this unspoken contract, and how their narratives “attack” readers by denying them a pleasurable reading experience. The book identifies five different ways in which such texts alienate readers – through narrative speed, modalities of complaint, the grotesque, representations of extreme violence, and attacks on ontological assumptions – with a chapter devoted to both the manifestations of each and attempts at understanding the motives behind such commercially suicidal tactics.

Narrative speed is understood not as an approximation of the speed of life in the postmodern world, but rather as a narrative's acceleration beyond the safe bounds of comprehensibility. This is primarily achieved in three ways: the multiplication of various narrative units, the omission of expected connections, and creation of unexplained phantasmagorical anomalies. Focussing on novelists such as Ishmael Reed and Douglas Coupland, Hume considers manifestations of speed and concludes that this technique offers the most reward to the younger or “hip” reader, while the assault implied in the title Aggressive Fictions is directed not against those readers, but against those less accustomed to the idiom. Hume recognizes that various complaints have been voiced through literature from the classical period onwards, but distinguishes this ancient form from the subject of her second chapter by suggesting that the contemporary complaint attacks modern readers themselves. Considering why we might tolerate such attacks on our beliefs yet still persevere with such narratives, the study examines the relative merits of the self-centred complaint, the howl against an oppressor, and also the protest on behalf of another, such as arguments for animal rights. The third chapter rejects the notion that the grotesque cannot exist today, and instead aims to understand the power of the phenomenon in a world in which the master narratives which had once made it so effective have fragmented. Hume asserts that the grotesque can still operate at the site where two oppositional categories, such as male and female, seem to meet, while considering the importance of bodily, social and normalized forms of grotesque.

Violence is indissolubly linked here with the horror genre; the effects of terror, horror and revulsion, as theorized by Stephen King, form the basis for the fourth chapter. “Terror” focusses on postapocalyptic fiction, with the effect it seeks seemingly generated by the impossibility of any reprieve for the protagonists. “Horror” is concerned with the graphic dismemberments in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, and Hume suggests that the appeal of such a transgressive novel lies in our ability to reconsider our understanding of social edict by momentarily stepping outside the laws of decency. “Revulsion” deals with novels that break taboos concerning sexual practice and various forms of bodily excreta, such as those by Samuel R. Delany and Dennis Cooper. Finally, the study considers texts that discomfort the reader by challenging the ontological assumptions by which they make sense of the world. Considering works by Thomas Pynchon and Mark Danielewski, amongst others, Hume theorizes that the appeal of such novels lies in the feeling of accomplishment that comes with such a strong challenge to our interpretive skills.

The conclusion is titled “Why Read Aggressive Fictions?”, and while the question is certainly one that is worth asking, how successful Aggressive Fictions is in answering it, finally, is debatable. The sections dealing with violence and attacks on a reader's expectations are illuminating, and there are numerous suggestive readings of individual moments from different novels. Certain observations, though, fail to convince. The section on narrative speed proclaims too forcefully the uniqueness of this phenomenon in contemporary novels, while it does not sufficiently divide it from similar occurrences in modernist literature. Similarly, while the author is usually aware of different effects that such novels might have on various audience members, occasionally the reading public becomes too homogeneous. Hume's assertion that most readers will enjoy the ending of Pride and Prejudice not only raises questions about what audience this study posits, but also qualifies as the sort of assumption that many of the novels mentioned in Aggressive Fictions would want to challenge.