A joyful return to the paroxysms of laughter lurking in the American Midwest.
Violence, soy sauce and zombie survivalists abound in this clever and funny sequel to John Dies at the End (2009).
One of the great things about discovering new writers, especially in the narrow range of hybrid-genre comedic novels, is realizing that they’re having just as much fun making this stuff up as you are reading it. Sitting squarely with the likes of S.G. Browne and Christopher Moore, the pseudonymous Wong (Cracked editor Jason Pargin) must be pissing himself laughing at his own writing, even as he’s giving fans an even funnier, tighter and justifiably insane entry in the series. A quick prologue catches us up on Wong and friend David, whose first adventure was chock full of psychotropic drugs and X-Files style paranormality. The great thing about these characters is how normal they are amid the madness. “We’re not special, it’s just the result of some drugs we took,” Wong explains. “Just for future reference, if you’re ever at a party and a Rastafarian offers you a syringe full of a shiny black substance that crawls around on its own like the Blob, don’t take it. And don’t call us, either. We get enough bullshit from strangers as it is.” This time around, the boys are trying to mitigate an influx of spidery invaders that soon blossoms into a full-fledged zombie massacre. The humor here is unforced and good-naturedly gory. Anyone who enjoyed the recent films The Cabin in the Woods or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil will find themselves right at home. An upcoming (cult?) film adaptation of John Dies at the End promises to lure new readers.
A joyful return to the paroxysms of laughter lurking in the American Midwest.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-54634-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please...
In Center’s lighthearted latest (The Bright Side of Disaster, 2007), a young mother yearns for self-realization while wrangling three boisterous preschoolers and a distracted husband.
Lanie Coates’ introduction to Cambridge, Mass., where her composer husband Peter has begun graduate studies, is a local park, where she hopes to find other mothers to befriend. The Coateses, including three boys, Alexander, Toby and Baby Sam, all under the age of five, moved from Lanie’s close-knit Houston neighborhood, leaving her supportive parents behind. At the park, the mothers recoil in shock when Toby bites another child. All, that is, but one woman, who asks Lanie when she’s due. But Lanie isn’t pregnant—she hopes. Just as she’s about to demure, Amanda, Lanie’s cheerleader high-school classmate, appears out of nowhere and offers to organize a shower. Determined to drop postpartum pounds, Lanie signs up with a local gym. Every weeknight, after the kids are in bed, Lanie works out on the treadmill, ignoring glances from a middle-aged fellow exerciser with Ted Koppel hair. Peter, busy with his piano, mostly leaves Lanie to single-handedly supervise the boys. Hoping to revive her artistic career, former painter Lanie takes up photography and finds that she’s a natural despite having to fend off her instructor, the very same Ted Koppel look-alike. When Peter, on the eve of a career-making trip, catches “Ted” kissing Lanie, a communication impasse ensues, not helped by Lanie’s tendency to mislay cell phones. Amanda, mother of preternaturally docile Gracin, tries to mentor Lanie’s makeover, but tempers her beauty and sex tips with disillusion. (Amanda’s wealthy but homely husband has decamped, bursting her Martha Stewart bubble.) In less deft hands, the horrors of the out-of-control Coates toddlers would resemble bad reality television, but Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way, with Lanie’s plight.
Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6643-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
A sequel to the riveting Meg (1997), continuing the adventures of a prehistoric shark with a mouth like a garage door that marauds in the ocean’s upper waters along the California coast. In the previous installment, a supposedly extinct shark species was kept alive by the thermal warmth of smokers on the sea- bottom. When Meg and a pregnant female broke through the sludge and rose topside, all hell broke loose until the pregnant female’s offspring was drugged and imprisoned in a Marine showcase near Monterey. Now, four years later, oxygen-rich waters and overfeeding have nurtured the captive Meg to a size larger than either her father or mother. She’s in estrous and unfathomably hungry, can smell male sharks and tasty whales offshore, and at last breaks through the steel bars that have been placed between her and the open sea. Since she’s just swallowed three young boys, she also has a taste for human flesh. Her rage to feed leads to some startling effects, including a female photographer’s being bitten in half in her kayak, with Meg coming back to swallow the kayak and the body’s other half. The humans, meanwhile, are total stereotypes, and some of their drama and its setting appear to have been borrowed from James Cameron’s film The Abyss. Readers who saw Godzilla know that the climax must involve a whole family of monsters spreading about, although the present tale involves, as well, another extinct species: a reptile that’s four or five times larger than Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn—t get along with Meg. But don—t think Alten will kill off his golden gobbler. Best scene: Meg copulating with a smaller male, than eating him—just a bridal whiff from Melville and D.H. Lawrence. Not exactly taxing on the intellectual side, but a nail-biting summer read. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57566-430-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
BOOK TO SCREEN
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