DELIVERY OF DOOM

There’s a party game writers play from time to time. They’ll try to improvise a story based on the objects in front of them in the room. If Yaccarino was playing that game, he got carried away and threw every item in his house into this story.

This book is so inventive that every chapter—and sometimes every paragraph—is crammed with ideas. Most of the ideas involve pizza, because the main characters work for Zorgoochi Intergalactic Pizza, which is locked in a battle for supremacy with Quantum Pizza. Readers will learn about the “teleportation device that delivered pizza using radio waves, the liquid pizza that filled you up and quenched your thirst at the same time, and the pizza seed that could be planted and harvested.” Unfortunately, in his debut as a novelist, the author/illustrator is less inventive when it comes to plot mechanics. The characters make remarkably stupid decisions whenever necessary to advance the story. Any readers who shout “Don’t go in the basement!” when they’re watching a horror movie will scream themselves hoarse. The pictures, however, make up for any flaws in the narrative. The black-and-white ink drawings look like technical illustrations from a textbook from the far future. If clip art really were art, it would look like this. The story is not for everyone. The characters include a superintelligent clove of garlic and a walking pizza oven.

Readers with quirky senses of humor can look forward to being surprised—and then surprised again a few paragraphs later.