If you are familiar with the explosive End Times Quartet (Vernon God Little, Ludmila's Broken English, Lights Out in Wonderland, Meanwhile in Dopamine City) by DBC Pierre, you will be well-acclimatised to the heady heights traversed in this collection. Drawing on memoir and a life lived in pursuit of sensation, but always ignited by the flame of fiction, Petit Mal takes us further into the imagination of one of the most radically original prose stylists of the past decade. Accompanied by dozens of full-colour illustrations and photographic 'evidence', the stories here inhabit worlds defined by appetite, excess and transcendence. Whether through food, drink, sex, drugs, or a fantastic cocktail of all four, the impulse in this book is towards epiphany. And the inevitable hangover that follows. But even that (or those) in the world of DBC Pierre can be nourishing.