Another Bizarro publication from the author of Baby Jesus Buttplug and Satan Burger, which I have but haven’t gotten around to reading yet.

Everyone  in the world is either drafted or a draft dodger, and the world-wide war is between those two groups.  A collection of drafter soldiers are somewhere snowy and they loose their sex-bot, which is a shape-shifting robot thingy that they all take turns at when they’re horny/cold/bored.  They’re getting picked off by what they think is the enemy but is actually people like them who have spontaneously turned into giant dolls with ceramic faces… Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

When I read the summary of this I expected a book about being trapped in a total and pointless conflict and finding salvation in something that is arguably inanimate.  In fact, this very short book reads like a machine gun.  You keep getting peppered with new ideas and angles without really knowing where they’re all coming form or how you’re going to stitch all these bleeding holes of yours back together.

The ‘chapters’ range from a dozen to two paragraphs at a time and as isolated entities don’t seem to accomplish much.  III seems far more invested in patting himself on the back over the little snippets of ‘cool ideas’ he’s had, as thoroughly impractical as they are.  But then, it all ends with people turning into dolls for no apparent reason, so ‘impractical’ seems like kind of a moot point at this stage.

It’s a quick and certainly ‘different’ read, I’ll give it that, though it doesn’t seem to encapsulate what’s good about the Bizarro genre very well.  It’s not cheesy or B-Movie though it does have a lot of crudeness and sex.  It’s dark and surreal but there’s no clever point to it.  It doesn’t seem to be commenting about anything at the end even though it’s all there and ripe for the roasting if it just took its head out of it’s ‘look, I’ve invented three imaginative kinds of bullets aren’t I clever sleep with me because I’m edgy plz thnx’ arse.

Satan Burger will hopefully make a better read.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 5:39 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.