An over-the-top, excessively scatological pastiche of well-worn sci-fi tropes.
A motley crew of potty-mouthed adventurers travel the Milky Way to save humanity in McGhee’s SF novel.
When crustacean like aliens from the planet Nogn land their flying saucer on the outskirts of Dubuque, Iowa, in the second half of the 21st century, Ernie E. Parmenter III, a sad-sack, divorced, middle-aged Walmart greeter with a “trick colon,” bravely steps up to make first contact. The Nognians sell Ernie (who hopes to impress and win back his sexy ex-wife, Lorelei) an extinction-insurance policy, assuring him that the premium—planet Earth itself—isn’t payable until four billion years in the future, when the sun will begin to die. At first, Ernie is hailed as a hero. He even becomes a senator, but soon things start to go seriously awry: Ernie has failed to read the fine print. The Nognians re-sell the policy, and its new holder, Lord Xenu, emperor of the galaxy, is moving the planet to the center of the galaxy, triggering earthquakes. Realizing it’s up to him to save the Earth, Ernie sets out on a rescue mission with the Nognians, along with Lorelei, her second ex-husband, named Del Savagewood, and Del’s erratic robot, Gordon Bleu. Various madcap adventures ensue. McGhee packs the narrative with bizarre life-forms, sexy babes, violence, social satire, and slapstick, apparently aiming for a mashup of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and MAD magazine. While the book has some effective moments of humor, Ernie Parmenter is no Arthur Dent, and the days when the main audience for SF was made up of adolescent boys are long gone. (Tropes like galactic slave markets and human women being kidnapped into alien harems should have been left behind in the 1930s with Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless.) Even the robots are horny. The constant references to bodily functions, fluids, and related body parts (the word sphincter alone appears at least 10 times, puke a dozen) quickly become tiresome. McGhee’s writing is sloppy, rife with inconsistent spelling, changes of tense, and bad taste (“My spectrum analyzer is jumping around like a blue assed ape on a tent-pole trannie”).
An over-the-top, excessively scatological pastiche of well-worn sci-fi tropes.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 485
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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