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he subdued cover image of Sean Ashton’s new para novel Massive Massive Oil Slick (2025) conveys a disquieting sense of identity crisis via the schizophrenic architectural ensemble of a neo-vernacular Barratt style home, accented by mock Tudor half timbering, a Georgianised front porch and what appear to be 1970s-style office windows. Then there’s the tautophony of its title. What is going on here? Well, Ashton’s book is an OuLiPean lite exercise: procedural writing with its outcomes on display. Why para though? Mainly because MMOS has the look and thickness of a short literary novel, but is constrained, rather than say Finnegans Wake which is totally unrestrained, and a prolonged language orgy. No, here we have controlled scripting, deracinated sentences minus jouissance that audit a world gone wrong, gone bad: post-imperial Britain, very much shorn of its historical prefix ‘Great’, a case of managed decline, dysfunction. MMOS’s suave plotlessness is also an attribute that situates it outside of, and indeed beyond the scope of the conventional, narrative-driven romance, spy thriller or mystery tale; a foreign import from the art world but with ambitions way beyond that perimeter fence.

Despite being set up as a monologue, MMOS is never a bore, its weave of paragraphs delimited by three main incipits, i.e. ‘Expect’ (predictive/fateful), ‘Suppose’ (speculative/ theoretical) and ‘Avoid’ (minatory/experiential) which stem, and pour out from the speaker’s physiological ‘cockpit’, in an inglorious slick (the titular word is well chosen), sometimes recursive, crazily accumulative, but propelled by Ashton’s angst and sorrow, that seizes on the horrifying banalities and vexations of everyday subjective life in 2025. ‘Expect’ has been lifted, as if from BBC ‘Countryfile’s’ tweedified weekly weather forecast or regular roadside traffic updates, and emphasises impasses, delays, jams, while occasionally lingering over social phenomena that are slowly vanishing, such as sandwich boards and belisha beacons! So Sean from Accounts is very much a mock conservative, trying on old fogey carpet slippers, resigned to the passing of heritage from the pre Covid-19 world

baking hot phone boxes smelling of piss gone
there being
no stable zeitgeist any more, no collective memory

yet with his bad boy’s tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. In one hilarious episode a builder arrives in order to service Dante’s Inferno a subterranean portal to which, happens to be placed directly under the speaker’s dwelling (that crazy Barrett-style home again), and in a rare moment of interaction with an other, declares in a catchphrase that ‘it’s all going to have to come out’, showing Ashton’s attunement to colloquial parlance, for MMOS is an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow. Another of his anchor points is the lament ‘all over, all over, all over’, as if Michel de Montaigne had been reincarnated and was attempting elegiacally, under the influence of Kenneth Goldsmith’s rigid ploys, to grasp the complexity and sheer bulk of digital data in cyberspace; for a lot of this para novel emanates from the online world, meaning it is truly a warped dystopian vision; although its literary antecedents could plausibly include St Augustine’s Confessions, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Yet this strangely gripping, Hudibrastic text, poses some serious questions about traditional form (especially how it has been altered beyond recognition by formatting), and more importantly even the bothersome need to conjure up or devise the imaginary—fiction in other words—when the nature of contemporary reality is so disturbing, grotesque and comical? Thus Ashton figures as streetwise rapporteur, rather than straight novelist, his post-Cartesian mind disintegrating into gaga at times, under extreme pressure (that reiterated Massive of the title betraying how experience can just be too big for extra, fancier words, and so must be dealt with as if a child were placing one identical wooden brick upon another), yet somehow, just somehow, still hanging on to the art of writing as his coping mechanism, his salvation, another feature that makes MMOS so appealing: its tirades offer viral immunity, a prophylactic to the bombarded reader, sick with fear and loathing, incapable of finding words adequate to such a monstrous global reality.

Ashton has confessed to me that he still largely (i.e. 60%) writes as a reader, and that his fans understand MMOS better than he does; but his labours do prepare us for a great post-human shift, by listing the bygone and antiquated curatorially, a dilemma which Madeleine Thien, in a recent Times Literary Supplement survey, summed up as ‘a double helix: what must we preserve against catastrophe and against oblivion for the future?’ Bathetically this includes such benchmark moments as the sugary sweets Opal Fruits being rebranded as Starburst. Zut alors! Come what may though, Ashton’s merry slick just goes on and on, as if conspiracy theory, memoir, self-help paperbacks and autofiction were being sucked in, melted down and deformed, then made newly resplendent as one metaphysically coherent hellscape? And right on time, deep into the book, a section is dedicated to a hell-themed tourist attraction, which seems to be a literary cousin of the Chapman brothers monumental installation Fucking Hell (2008), an upended, FUBAR-ed world. Yet, although MMOS is grimly diagnostic of human self-inflicted ailments and folly, it is also a hilarious romp, and offers an unrelenting critique and takedown of the 1% of oligarchs too, those shadowy power brokers now running things that is, who in the near, very near future can expect to suffer citizen justice ‘stone-blind, groping along on all fours like Nebuchadnezzar’.

Lastly, as a final page, the book comes with its own Playlist of relevant tunes, ranging from northern soul to obscure punk, and acid house. On its YouTube page the cited New Fast Automatic Daffodils track ‘Big’ is commented on by @Mothbeat1: ‘My goodness me! what a veritable banger it is!’ The same could be said of Sean Ashton’s MMOS, less a book than a menacing entity which has escaped its soft covers.