Having been a fan of Christopher Brookmyre's since I first picked up "One Fine Day In The Middle Of The Night", I was looking forward to this. It feels like something of a mashup to me - "OFDITMOTN" meets "Be My Enemy" in terms of setting, with a smattering of "A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away"... Except with demons in place of terrorists.
Still, even when he's in familiar territory, Brookmyre never disappoints. His dialogue is as realistic as ever - Especially the teenaged characters. If the likes of Grange Hill were in any way realistic, it'd be 18-rated on language alone, and that fact is captured perfectly here in the banter between the kids that flows perfectly ( Albeit down a gutter ) without straying into stylised Tarantinoism.
The same goes for the gory/violent setpieces - every Brookmyre novel has a couple of moments that stick in your minds' eye in visceral detail, and this is no exception. I'll have that Monty Python song stuck in my head for weeks now, with the accompanying mental image raising a grin every time. Why filmic adaptations of his work are so frustratingly near-nonexistent I do not know. I'd pay good money to see screaming demons disembowelled in amusing ways!
The cheeky referencing is back as well, from the outright bigging-up of Neil Gaiman to the slightly more subtle.
"Dodgson Anomaly", Mr Brookmyre?
I see what you did there...
And I like the cut of your Gib.