BOOK REVIEW / New blood, not much bite: 'Suckers' - Anne Billson: Pan, 4.99 pounds

SAY WHAT you like about the Best of Young British Novelists malarky (and why not? everyone else has), as a promotional ploy it seems to be working. Here is a first novel whose racy title and foil encrustations might normally earn it little serious critical notice. But the name on the cover is Anne Billson, one of the 20 newly anointed; ergo sudden, if provisional, respect.

Suckers turns out to be not sleaze but satire, and wins instant credit for not being yet another tired campus/Chiantishire romp or pallid homage to Martin Amis. The narrator is Dora, a London 'creative consultant' with Absolutely Fabulous in her genes, ice in her soul and a dark secret shared only with Duncan, the boyfriend who dumped her in the early Eighties. Dora's private life is dreary, with little to choose, for entertainment, between booze-free vegetarian dinners with Duncan and his current, whey-faced girlfriend, and evenings spent sending anonymous death-threats to the woman who once gazumped her. Only Duncan's absent-minded habit of arranging salt in fine white lines on the tablecloth, and the stump on Dora's hand where one of her fingertips used to be, remain as reminders of more toothsome tunes.

The narrative takes a while to get going, but eventually erupts into a pacy, gleeful tale of vanity, megalomania and vampire revenge, replete with terrible jokes. (Vamps, it seems, call humans nips, so are always alert for a nip in the air.) Creepy Violet, who years ago stole Duncan from Dora, turned out to have quirky drinking habits and had to be disposed of - a well-aimed sharpened ruler followed by careful dismemberment: eat your hearts out, Ian McEwan and Bret Easton Ellis - but the Undead, like the Have Nots in their cardboard boxes, are always with us. Violet is back, operating from Docklands' multiglass tower, and she's not alone: all those red- lipped women in tight black frocks aren't just fashion victims after all. This is war.

You would have to be in a coma to miss Billson's metaphorical intent. City shenanigans, vacuous style magazines, drugs, Lego architecture and all the other sitting ducks of the idiot Eighties get their due. But the ideas remain oddly unabsorbed, bobbing jauntily on the sheeny meniscus of the prose without ever quite coalescing into the kind of original, even savage vision you might expect from someone who is being offered as one of our 20 most talented young writers.

If the book really typified the best our younger writers can do - it doesn't: there are many much better novelists, humorous and otherwise, among the Chosen - then all the recent bitching would be justified. Perhaps Anne Billson was included precisely for her enjoyable weightlessness, as the literary meringue on a heavier, more complex pudding. Well, OK. But those gifted thirtysomethings still smarting over their omission from The List should probably not read Billson until they have simmered down a bit. Otherwise they might feel moved to set off at nightfall, incisors filed to nasty little points, in pursuit of Granta nips.