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This inspired collection of four stories uses the liver as framework and controlling metaphor – there’s a tale for each lobe – but is less interested in the organ as a metabolic regulator than in what happens when it’s damaged beyond repair. At this point, Will Self’s gift for (ahem) bilious satire kicks in, its target largely the ‘slapstick of addiction’ – for which the reformed junky has witheringly little time.

The first story, Foie Humain, plumps a stool for us in ‘miasmal’ Soho members’ club The Plantation, where raddled old geezers drink themselves to death while employing a unique and self-congratulatory argot in which the word ‘cunt’ features heavily. Self conjures this world with brio so that we sense all too clearly the rage that underlies the glibness. In narrative terms, not much happens until the horrible climax, but there’s a very funny sequence where the club’s regulars venture outside to see one of their number in a production of Beckett’s Endgame at a nearby theatre. The effort nearly kills them: “‘Why – why the fuck,’ Val panted, ‘did we fucking walk here?’”

Leberknödel follows a dying woman (she has liver cancer) and the daughter she despises as they travel to Zürich to achieve her ‘assisted suicide’. At the last moment, she refuses to drink the proffered Phenobarbital, which is just as well, for spontaneous recovery ensues – a recovery so remarkable that she is co-opted by a mysterious Catholic sect which recognises her value as propaganda. Leberknödel is at its most effective when it’s least Self-ish. The first half, which may surprise those who have Self pegged as a dealer in outsized grotesquery, captures beautifully the rancorous dysfunctionality that can attend mother-daughter relationships. The second drags a little as Self seems uncertain when to wrap things up.

The last two stories are shorter. Birdy Num Num is a heroin horror show narrated by a sub-microscopic agent of HIV, while Prometheus transports characters from Greek myth to London’s adland. The fire-stealing Titan was, you will recall, chained to a rock by Zeus, and his liver pecked at daily by a vulture. Self has all the fun you’d expect with this, and the result is satire so vicious it makes the UK’s notoriously cynical Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker look restrained. John O’Connell