During Pixies' late 1980s/early 90s heyday, Black Francis's Boston indie-rockers mixed crunching riffs and sweet melodies with twisted lyrics that referenced biblical numerology and the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel alongside more typical rock'n'roll concerns.

His first novel is a collaboration with Pixies biographer Josh Frank and Steven Appleby, the Guardian cartoonist who contributed to one of the band's album covers. As you might expect, it's a curious affair, linking early pornography, jazz-age Paris (Buñuel has a cameo) and an exploding battleship. It follows Soldier Boy, a young man who is discharged from the army under mysterious circumstances and thrust into a series of dark adventures. He stars in "La Bonne Auberge", arguably the first-ever porn film, meets his double, rambles through France and has a wild night out with assorted artists. This is a gorgeous, chaotic book, its cover pierced by a peephole, its pages mixing stage directions and prose with Appleby's comic, unsettling sketches. Reality blurs and burns ("Time," a projectionist points out, "really is just light in different places"), but the prose remains rather flat, leaving a book with plenty of sparkle that never quite soars.

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