A Little Bit Bad Author: Cassandra Neyenesch Publisher:ISBN-13: 9780241792896Publisher: Fig Tree Guideline Price: £16.99; 342ppYou hear faintly horrifying stories of people (men) who plan their art the way Nike plans a shoe campaign. Take Jonathan Franzen, who, early in his career, “mapped the world” for his novels; in other words, he made charts that included all the hot topics of the day, to ensure his work encompassed everything that might be considered relevant (a very funny move from him, therefore, to call his current trilogy A Key To All Mythologies. At least, I hope he’s being funny). And then there was Will Smith who, back in the 1990s, discovered that the biggest movies all had special effects, creatures and a love story, and chose roles accordingly, making him the most popular actor of the era.Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that, when planning A Little Bit Bad, Cassandra Neyenesch was making charts of what ingredients might go together to make a book that pretty much every female reader (so, most readers) would utterly devour – but she might as well have. This book is so perfectly positioned on the cultural pulse, novel-wise, that if Neyenesch’s style wasn’t so wonderfully idiosyncratic, I’d almost suspect someone of having asked AI to write a surefire hit. We’ve got a kooky, horny, middle-aged mommy, a good-looking yet emotionally constipated husband, a band of merry friends, a hot roofer, a lovable, troubled brother, and – yes, you better believe it – a (faintly meta) murder mystery plotline that runs over and through the main plotline, which in turn is of a middle-aged woman having hot sex with a younger guy who tells her she has “beauty to spare”. Yes please. This book should be read in the bath with a glass of wine, and I say that as a positive; it’s not stupid or cliched or pompous, the way a lot of promising bath books are. It’s so funny and brutal that it might make you get in a fight with your own husband afterwards, and/or start looking up roofers in your area. Yet this isn’t just some ironic, highfalutin romance novel. Things get nicely bizarro and, even if you’ve seen it coming, the denouement is deeply satisfying. There were moments in which Neyenesch’s insights were so hilariously, painfully true that I wondered, “wow, how did she do that?”Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of two story collections, Paris Syndrome (2019) and Let’s Dance (2024). Her forthcoming novel, Brief Tableau, Brief Laugh, will be published in September 2027 by Banshee Press.