B. S. Johnson's short comic novel, the last published in his lifetime, follows Christie Malry, an unremarkable young accounts clerk at a London confectionery factory, who takes the principles of double-entry bookkeeping and applies them to his own life. Frustrated by the petty injustices and indignities he suffers at the hands of authority and society, Christie devises a system of moral double-entry: for every offense the world commits against him, he records a debit, and he sets out to balance the books by exacting an equivalent credit in the form of revenge. What begins with minor acts of retaliation escalates, following the pitiless logic of the ledger, toward violence on an ever-larger scale, so that a droll conceit becomes, by the end, genuinely alarming. Johnson was the leading British experimental novelist of his generation, a fierce believer that fiction should tell the truth and dispense with the artifices of conventional storytelling, and the book is characteristically self-aware: the author intrudes upon his own narrative, comments on its construction, and even lets Christie discuss the fact that he is a character in a novel. Beneath the metafictional play and deadpan wit runs a bleak satire of capitalism, bureaucracy, and the accounting mentality applied to human relations—the reduction of grievance and justice to a matter of settling accounts. Brief, funny, and formally inventive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is regarded as Johnson's most accessible and entertaining work, a black comedy that turns the language of the balance sheet into an instrument of anarchic revenge.