Sprout Mask Replica

_Sprout Mask Replica_ starts with a series of tall tales purporting to be the story of Rankin's ancestors, including the owner of the Sporran from Hell and the man who ate a motorbike. Rankin seems to be more popular in Ireland than in England, and his brand of public-bar mythologising and telling of tall tales is certainly very much an Irish thing and may account for this. Joe Haldeman suggests in a "Locus" interview that actual writing, piling on incident and amusing yourself with dialogue, is easy; it's telling a story, shaping the whole into a coherent structure when we know that life doesn't *do* coherent structures, that's harder. 

There is also plenty of poetry, if you can call it that, recalling the days when Rankin used to run 'Poems and Pints' at the Brentford Watermans Arts Centre. Much of it was real doggerel, including his. *Sprout Mask Replica* is ostensibly the story of someone who creates chaotic events: the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon that creates a hurricane in China, that lad. 

RR has admitted that he wrote this and the other books of his around this time while taking copious amounts of drugs. Later on around 2000-1 he seems to have been in a decline from this state (as witness "Web Site Story" which he has practically disowned) and only picked up in the years after that.