[2][3] As the critic Robert Kiely suggests, his books tend to be "baroque in their density, speed, and finely crafted detail; they are overcrowded, they dazzle and distort and wait for us to catch up with their narrative world.
"[4] Although Aylett is best known for his novels, and for his transmedial metafiction Lint, he has also created comics, stand-up, performance, music, movies, and art, often working in appropriative and other avant-garde modes.
The setting of these works has been described as a "cyber-noir vision of a near-future metropolis with a comic-book aesthetic"[5] and as "a crime-ridden urban-noir hell inhabited by a menagerie of grotesque, amoral characters and surreal, mind-bending technology.
Only an Alligator (2001), The Velocity Gospel (2002), Dummyland (2002), and Karloff's Circus (2004) are set in Accomplice, a suburb on a tropical peninsula in a perhaps nuclear-blasted future, underneath which live demons; Aylett says he is in the tradition of "real satirists" such as Voltaire, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.
The book traces Jeff Lint's career through thinly disguised satires on a number of well-known writers from the late 20th century, including Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey.