A cartoonish but entertaining sendup of modern life and its discontents.
A self-conscious puppet struggles to become a real man in this raucous satire.
Fleming’s fable unfolds on the planet Urftoo, which has a purple sun, a religion based on the orgiastic worship of a Christ-like lobster, and an economy run on the labor of sentient puppets. When puppet-maker Miltro Miggugen dies from eating a poisoned pistachio made by the Power Chemicals conglomerate, his creations, including a wizard puppet, a dinosaur puppet, and a urine-scented ant puppet, must fend for themselves with nothing but couch-stuffing to eat (and then vomit). Thrust to the fore is straight-arrow engineer puppet Felty FuzzPalace, who leads the others against attacking birds and human thugs who threaten to sell the puppets for scrap to pay off Miltro’s debts. Felty’s maturation accelerates when he meets a “squishy”—a silicone-bodied sex puppet—named Stephy, who demonstrates that sex and other emotionally fraught experiences can temporarily turn puppets into humans. Enjoined by Miltro’s bathroom-dwelling ghost to avenge his death, Felty takes a job at Power Chemicals, where the novel turns into a broad, jaundiced spoof of the corporate world, complete with an executive who’s literally an empty suit. Felty’s sense of engineering rectitude is offended when he’s tasked with designing a substandard plastic lid for machinery that makes a dangerous neurological drug—but he finds that his body is now attached to puppet strings hanging from the office ceiling and labeled “mortgage,” “fatherhood” and “promotion,” which make him unable to resist the company’s directives. Fleming offers up a colorful fantasia that feels like what would happen if Franz Kafka and David Lynch teamed up on a reboot of The Muppet Show. It’s dedicated to making the mechanisms of bourgeois conformism, which rob people of individuality and integrity, luridly visible, and the author shows a rich comic inventiveness in his puppet’s-eye view of the world. He also presents a brilliant vernacular that mixes grandiloquence with banality: “Good and evil: outmoded fairy tales sung by the weak and the lethargic in the throes of a drunken, ill-DJ’ed karaoke party.” The result is a vigorous, if not exactly subtle, social critique and an imaginative picaresque.
A cartoonish but entertaining sendup of modern life and its discontents.Pub Date: May 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9891247-6-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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