A nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level.
A young stand-up comic finds his world turned upside down when a mysterious brain disease kills off the world’s sense of humor.
This debut novel by Guffey (Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction and Homeland Security, 2015, etc.) is a strange mishmash of influences. It taps into the cultural zeitgeist of I’m Dying Up Here, Showtime’s gritty portrait of stand-up comedy, but then squanders its traction on a navel-gazing contemplation of how humor makes us human. Elliot Greeley is a stand-up comedian creeping up on 30, making his way around the indie comedy circuit with his best friend, Danny Oswald. Trading on routines like “My Girlfriend’s a Coke Whore,” Elliot is emblematic of comedians like David Cross, a bitterly funny, vulgar comic who’s reaching burnout in a hurry. It doesn’t help that he self-prophesizes his own dilemma in the first few pages. “I often wondered if most of the human race wasn’t suffering from some kind of strange disease, an anti-evolutionary trait that prevented them from detecting the mad humor that surrounded them each and every day,” Elliot muses. Sure enough, a mysterious new illness starts attacking people’s funny bones, and Elliot and his friends fall into a deep metaphysical funk. Guffey tries to inject some humor with a gig opening for a punk band (“Doktor Delgado’s All-American Genocidal Warfare Against The Sick And The Stupid”), a pair of bumbling Jehovah’s Witnesses in the vein of Vladimir and Estragon, and a host of other satiric figures, but the book turns very dark as Elliot’s friend Heather returns from a gig in San Francisco. Asked if anyone was getting any laughs, she responds: “Some, the ones who aren’t funny. The rest of us were devastated, we couldn’t understand it. The whole city felt dead, filled with dead people, dead cars, dead buildings, dead girders, dead molecules, everything dead. Dead to the core.”
A nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59780-918-4
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Night Shade
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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