Perverted By Language ed Peter Wild

If you go back 25 years or so, it is hard to imagine Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Angela Carter rushing to be part of a collection of short stories with titles borrowed from the music of, say, Van Der Graaf Generator. While Peter Wild's contributors list is not quite that illustrious, it does contain names - Michel Faber, Rebbecca Ray, Mick Jackson - with actual writerly cachet. The sense that these authors have much more to gain from this transaction than Salfordian garage-rock magus Mark E Smith tells us very little about the shifting balance of power between what used to be called "high" and "low" culture, but a great deal about The Fall's uniquely literary character.

The fact that this band is named after a novel by Camus doesn't really come into it. Mark E Smith's collected lyrics constitute a treasure-house of linguistic riches on a par with any in the rock 'n' roll canon, up to and including Bob Dylan's. And while his oeuvre does have an explicitly bookish component - he often marks out his own creative terrain with the help of maps supplied by William Burroughs or H P Lovecraft - it's in its engagement with culture and society as a whole that Smith's own writing attains its highest degree of literary significance. With his intuitive grasp of the connections between history, a sense of place and the collective unconscious, disciples of the cult of psycho-geography might plausibly see him as John the Baptist to Iain Sinclair's Jesus.

With such a deep well of inspiration to draw upon, this anthology gets off to a dispiritingly brackish start. An opening brace of unimaginitively nasty contributions from Niall Griffiths and Matthew David Scott seem all too eager to conform to the golden rule of second-rate short story writing: if you don't have an actual idea, then kill someone at the end. Once established, the prevailing mood of self-satisfaction and intellectual laziness proves very hard to shake. Michel Faber's "Fortress/Deer Park", with its gratuitous plethora of incorporated song-titles, and craven refusal to grapple with the ghost of Norman Mailer, is especially disappointing.

As a general rule, the harder the writers work to establish their super-fan credentials, the further away the stories seem to get from the essential spirit of their source material. Perverted By Language's two undoubted highlights both (like The Fall themselves) colonise more marginal and obstreporous territory. Sci-fi outsider Carlton Merrick III's liquorice-flavoured shark temptresses eat the bulk of the competition for breakfast in the piquantly salacious "City Hobgoblins".

But it's John Williams's excellent "An Older Lover etc" which really steals the show. This insightfully embittered elaboration ("Not exactly a story, but... not the truth either") on the theme of his actual meetings with the band simultaneously redeems and damns its host volume with the same singular revelation: the only truly worthwhile fiction inspired by The Fall is the stuff we can make of our own lives with Mark E Smith's help.