If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse’s house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in Dead Babies, a novel from “one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME). Martin Amis, a born comic novelist in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh, crafts a mercurial style that can rise to Joycean brilliance. According to Julian Barnes, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending, “Amis’s version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is… fizzing with style, [and] busy with verbal inventiveness.”

The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There’s even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of “dead babies”—dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.