'Big glow-worms, red as cinders, made entrance from his stretched bowels, walking right out, onion-stenched, the colour of niggers dropped smooth on their heads. How could I see this in the flame? I do not know, but answer carefully that all that can be viewed is never the full canvas; and stood foursquare before that blaze-topped being resembling (as I have stated) Azazel, the goat shamen, that reviled pig of the Jew.'

Hanged boys, their cocks spurting as their necks snap, can be found in branches of Waterstones up and down the country: check the fiction section, under B for Burroughs. The excesses of fashionable shock merchants like Brett Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper nestle alongside bloated Jilly Cooper novels; even works explicitly detailing the fine points of the greatest bugbear of the day, child sexuality and abuse, have found a home here. A distinction is made, a line drawn. This is literature. Where one burns books, one finally burns people. And Savoy?

'"I want a better England. Who could not want a better England? Not just a return to Empire and Expansion, but real pride expressed in old Albion, in our National achievements, which is superior to all countries excepting Germany. We rode unseeingly into the valley of cursed blood, and to our detriment we allowed foreign BLOOD to pollute our sacred heritage. England has become a mongrel circus. The rejects, the spastics, the bent, the mental cripples of the world have gleefully mounted our Motherland, in the process fucking her down to her knees, without clemency. Hand-outs to every sub-continent of ethnic wasters on earth have weakened our divinity. "What is England now but the laughing stock of the Earth? So unsure of our worth that under the guise of liberal moralising, we throw away our greatest asset - the pureness of English blood."'

It is perhaps unfair to start any review of a Savoy product referring to censorship. Savoy has been around for such a long time, and has published such a wide variety of books, that to be considered solely as the victims of a tyrannical state's efforts to silence the subversive must be galling for them. And yet it is keenly pertinent here. The first Lord Horror novel, 'Lord Horror', published in 1990, was the first book to be banned in England since Hubert Selby Jr's 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' in 1968; the ban was overturned on appeal in 1992. The Lord Horror comics have similarly come under fire, with some still banned to this day. Lord Horror's strong stuff - make no mistake.

So what's so contentious? Books dealing with the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and fascism are hardly new. The Holocaust has indeed attained iconic status as the ultimate display of man's inhumanity to man - a nightmarish other-world of pure evil, the kind of thing that could never happen in England. The industry surrounding the revisiting of the Holocaust today, from high-budget Hollywood recreations to tourist trips to Auschwitz, an inverse Disneyland, strengthens the iconography by ensuring that the Holocaust and Nazi Germany occupy bogeymen position in our minds - a kind of fairytale grimness hangs over these revisited scenes. But allowing the imagination free rein to play with the established iconography is strongly taboo; any divergence is often punished by law, demonstrating not only a panicked reaction to the spectre of neo-Nazism but also a keen desire to keep the boundaries clearly marked. We are good. They are bad. We could not do this. We are not responsible. It's a similar dichotomy to that found in the phenomenon of 'true crime', and the press coverage of paedophiles and child killers: a demonising which serves to distance 'us' from 'them', a reassurance that this is what 'pure evil' is like. Inhuman, bestial - these people couldn't possibly be like us.

Such passionate hatred is only seen elsewhere on these shores in the reaction of some parts of the British population to immigration - newsgroup postings with titles like 'send them back or string them up' are not uncommon. Immigrants - a distinction is occasionally but not often made between illegal immigrants and asylum seekers - are filthy, lazy and greedy; not a million miles from the projected face of Jews in Nazi Germany. But of course that could never happen here - although there were English sympathisers to the Nazi cause. It blurs the boundaries a little, so they're not discussed much nowadays. One was William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to Britain. Also known as Lord Haw-Haw - whose doppelgänger here is Lord Horror.

The world of Lord Horror is one which takes the constituent elements of the Holocaust and the culture surrounding it - along with liberal dashes of absurdist humour, modernist literature and full-bore rock'n'roll - and forces them together in ways which simultaneously don't fit and perversely shed more light on the psychology of fascism than any number of more straight-laced tomes. The world of Lord Horror is one of irreducible weirdness. There's no discernible plot development, either here or in the Lord Horror comics; just a cycle of horrific atrocities peppered with grotesque comedy. Burning Jews rain from the sky, confectionery spilling from every orifice; new extremes of slaughter are matched blow for blow with new extremes of absurdity. It's not only the content which jars, either; the style is a similarly bizarre mix of register, arcane dialogue mixing with wartime slang and a continual use of asides - Horror's thoughts on life, the universe, buggery and the judicious use of a straight razor.

It's important to see Baptised in the Blood of Millions as the latest instalment of an ongoing project, dovetailing neatly into the space left by the first Lord Horror novel and the Lord Horror comics, which have been published at an astonishingly slow rate - about one a year at present - since 1989. The text in the Lord Horror comics is more impenetrable than that on offer here, some issues being made entirely of cut-ups from works like 'The Waste Land' and 'Ulysses'; but the fact that the series features some of artist John Coulthart's most impressive illustrations, making it an essential read, as well as being probably the only British comic around worth reading. 'Baptised in the Blood of Millions' presents the Horror universe in a different light altogether; while the comics present a sense of fracture and discontinuity, all fragmented quotations and looping atrocities, this is presented in the style of an autobiography, with Horror concomitantly awarding himself the airs and graces of a turn-of-the-century dandy, proud as a peacock. The style and content here are moreover absurdist rather than modernist, and Horror's egotism reveals his fallibility and weakness - a far cry from the superheroic character of the comics.

As tasters for the Lord Horror universe either will do - you'll want to investigate more, even if neither the comics nor the book can truly be said to entertain. Britton's vision is too dark, his take both too bizarre and too perfectly fitting for this to be an easy read - but you can be sure, at a time when popular fiction has all the verve of a limbless whippet, that it'll be like nothing you've ever seen before.