Books like The Brentford Chain-Store Massacre

My first taste of Robert Rankin's work was the BBC radio adaptation of The Brightonomicon. I found it to be hilarious, so, of course, I went on to read the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was pleased to find that it was the eighth book in a "trilogy" of nine, and promptly began buying the rest of the series.The Brentford Chainstore Massacre is the fifth book in the series and, in my opinion, the best (chronologically speaking) so far. The writing style that attracted me to the series in The Brightonomicon comes fully into its own for the first time in the series. Rankin attacks his brand of fiction with his tongue pressed so firmly into his cheek that it's in danger of poking through! The story is paced to read like a blockbuster action movie, with humorous transitions tying one part of the story to the next, no matter how unrelated they are.Chainstore also marks the first time in the series where Rankin not so much breaks down the fourth wall as rides a bulldozer through it. And then reverses over the debris. Probably laughing manically as he goes.The usual cast are back, with Pooley and Omally taking centre stage, surrounded by the same faces and, of course, a great evil to battle. The duo hatch a plan to get their hands on some of the Millennial Celebration Funding two years early, not knowing that, by doing so, they are causing a certain event to take place at a certain time that will have wonderful consequences for humanity.So, of course, they can't be allowed to succeed.From cloned saviors to ancient scrolls, assassinated monks to hell lizards, this story has everything you could imagination... if your imagination was full of very strange things, and on the tail end of a prolonged session on hard drugs.The only negative I came away from this story with is that the plot seems a little... well, plotless at times, with the events of entire chapters seemingly voided by what follows them. Still, for a story that, at times, pokes fun at its own narrative, a gripe about plot cohesion is a relatively small gripe to have.For fans of Rankin, this book is a must-read, though I would recommend reading the earlier novels in this particular series first if you haven't already, or if you are new to his work. Not, you understand, because of any overarching plot (very little is carried over from story to story), but because the evolution of Rankin's writing style is most evident over this series of novels, and I'd imagine that reading The Antipope after this could be a bit underwhelming.