For the Telegraph, Lionel Shriver compares J.G. Ballard’s consumerist satire, Kingdom Come, unfavorably to Rupert Thomson’s.

With the bluntness of Ballard’s satirical blade, this novel cannot approach a book such as Rupert Thomson’s Soft!, which addressed similar themes of corporate thuggery and the empty promise of “consumerism”, a word that may not appear anywhere in Thomson’s text. Thomson’s premise (a soft-drinks company brainwashes sleep-study subjects to crave and therefore advertise its new drink, before hiring a hit-man to dispose of one subject whose brain-washing has gone awry) was at least as over-the-top as Ballard’s, but the execution was both hilarious and truly dark.

(For the record, though I bow before the man and admired many aspects of the book, Soft! is not one of my favorite Thomson novels. It is, however, one of James Hynes’ faves.)