If you read Finnegans Wake for the off-color puns; if you take to Flann O’Brien’s satirical novels as happily as a pup going for a morning walk; if, like Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, you suspect you saw something nasty in the woodshed; if, like J.P. Donleavy, you’d like to decompose when you die in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs of Dublin; if you sometimes wish you were an extra in John Gay’s raucous The Beggar’s Opera, then Guillermo Stitch’s new novel, Lake of Urine, is for you ... Admittedly, that’s a lot of ifs. Can’t I also have, one might ask, characters I can identify with, a tendon of plot and the consoling sense that I’m a moral and high-minded person? Not here, no. Lake of Urine offers instead strange harbingers, offbeat mental exfoliations, subterranean impulses, verbal ambuscades and warty, warty manifestations of joy, wit and lust ... Stitch has more fun than a writer should be allowed to have ... Nothing about Lake of Urine seems forced ... Stitch flicks his blade around all the important things in life, isolating absurdities, nicking arteries. He deflates pretension at every turn. He throws images like tarot cards. He’s a caustic humorist with serious intent. His novel invites you to view the world as fundamentally absurd and usually awful, but also to recognize that laughter is a mighty, and cleansing, recompense ... As if made for our moment, Lake of Urine imparts a sense of old ways collapsing, and of men and women adjusting to brute new realities.

... most unusual ... absolutely savage ... both a quasi-fantasy work and a biting satire. Despite its unfortunate title, Lake of Urine is absurdly funny, a merciless mockery of all our sacred cows (most especially our cash cows) and it pokes endless fun at our basic human need; to feel important, at least to one person, but preferably to more than one ... The author delights in wrongfooting the reader as the plot shifts shapes (and time) and we reel from one delicious scene to another. If that sounds a little chaotic, then the chaos is strictly in the comedy. The novel itself is as tight as a fist ... An audacious love story as well as all the other things it is, Lake of Urine thumbs its nose at any attempt to describe it coherently, but this is part of its maddening charm. The reader is simply immersed in a series of outrageous pastiches, and, as the drama reaches fever pitch, it is then boiled down to its essence: that so much of the meaning we attach to our lives is meaningless.

... one of the strangest novels of the year ... At the centre of this bawdy, absurdist farce is a sardonic portrait of ambivalent motherhood ... Judged by the morally fastidious standards of contemporary fiction, the novel’s comic sensibility is somewhat off-colour, finding its mirth in child manslaughter, parental neglect, canine defenestration and the antics of a psychologically damaged 'strumpet'. Readers may well wonder whether there is a satirical subtext to the throwback prose style and slightly dated repartee. There isn’t: Lake of Urine is a jeu d’esprit, best enjoyed on its own deranged terms. And it is genuinely funny, with nuggets of surreal whimsy on almost every page.

In some ways, Guillermo Stitch’s latest novel is a kind of modern fairy tale, a strange fable with an even stranger moral at its heart ... Stitch’s prose is mesmerising; his vocabulary is nothing short of awesome (and I mean that in the divine sense of the word) while his ability to weave whimsy and magical realism into an accented, almost anachronistically antiquated style is practically sublime. As a storyteller, Stitch seems to know what he’s doing, and the result is akin to the literary lovechild of Terry Pratchett and Salvador Dali. As a book that’s unapologetically bizarre, if not downright weird, it won’t be for everyone. But it’s certainly something.

The odd world Stitch creates is enlivened by his vibrant characters and ornate prose, which blends the archaic, grandiloquent, and lyrical along with nuggets of the idiomatic and euphemistic. Stitch tries neither to faithfully recreate our own world nor to fabricate an entirely alien one. The mimetic effect is like something out of a dream, familiar and unsettling, a convincing achievement on par with the recognizable nowhereness of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman ... Humor is difficult to sustain in a novel. Yes, Lake of Urine will make you laugh. At times it seems like Stitch is trying too hard to put the reader in stitches. There’s a gag on nearly every page ... Jokes of every kind abound, including ones that play with language. These are difficult to pull off and, on more than one occasion, Stitch doesn’t quite do so ... that is where Lake of Urine’s weakness lies: on the level of structure. It sometimes feels as though the author intended this to be a much longer book, given the disproportionate time allotted to each character. Even though some of the finer passages and moments of genuine tenderness and hard-earned feeling can be found in the Emma section, it is hard not to expect that the wacky antics of Seiler will resurface ... That being said, Stitch shows off some impressive prose chops as he takes us through the remarkable and harrowing ups and downs of Emma’s life, flickers of dark humor always lurking around the next paragraph ... an imaginative pressure cooker, a modern Rabelaisian fairy tale that replaces enchantment with an antic version of the grotesquerie of contemporary life ... There is a narrative velocity here that dovetails the cartoonish and the Dickensian without suggesting we are reading a 'big ambitious novel' ... the book should be credited with fully embodying the publisher’s manifesto ... I have no doubt that Stitch will find his dedicated, and suitably anarchistic, readers. But his work isn’t for everyone, particularly those who want to be inspired or self-improved by the blowhards on The New York Times best-sellers list. Like any successful satirist, Stitch rejoices in contortion, painful and hilarious, and his shape-shifting is aimed at breaking 'the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it),' as Herbert Marcuse put it, in order 'to define what is real.' Lake of Urine suggests that, even if the magic has gone out of this world, fiction might be able to offer a saving charm, or open a portal to a new one.