Pure Slaughter Value

Pure Slaughter Value (1997) is a collection of 13 short stories by Robert Bingham, which, alongside his novel Lightning on the Sun (published 2000), represents the only works he produced prior to his death in 1999.

The stories are populated by "curiously unsympathetic"[1] characters that are "jaded rich kids and yuppies strung out on familial malfeasance and their own immaturity, blocked from satisfaction in either work or love"; a Guardian review considered the stories to be "filled with hatred of the elitist world that spawned its author."[2] [3] The New York Times made note of Bingham's "acute observational powers and clean, reportorial prose."[4]

List of stories
  • "I'm Talking About Another House"
  • "This Is How A Woman Gets Hit"
  • "The Target Audience"
  • "Bad Stars"
  • "The Other Family"
  • "Plus One"
  • "Doubles"
  • "The Fixers"
  • "How Much For Ho Chi Minh?"
  • "Preexisting Condition"
  • "Marriage Is Murder"
  • "Reggae Nights"
  • "Pure Slaughter Value"
gollark: There are the naïve enthusiastic people who go buy consumer IoT devices and them replace then when they inevitably stop being supported, the grizzled sysadmin/developer types who have seen the horrors of modern computing and don't trust it, the mystical few who are competent enough to run their own stuff and have it work, and people who want to be/think they are that but who spend all their time recompiling the kernel on their smart fridge.
gollark: https://pics.me.me/i-work-in-it-which-is-the-reason-our-house-41514357.png
gollark: There are multiple kinds of tech enthusiast.
gollark: A lot of the time you're just doing boring drudgery integrating other already-existing things, which will soon be significantly automated I think. Sometimes you actually need to spend time thinking about clever algorithms to do a thing, or how to make your thing go faster, or why your code mysteriously doesn't work, which is harder.
gollark: It's mentally challenging, sometimes, but obviously not particularly physically hard.

References
  1. https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/bib/971005.rv102353.html
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/01/fiction.features
  3. http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-48855-6
  4. https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/bib/971005.rv102353.html
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