Number 84- Twas The Nightshift before Christmas- Adam Kay

 

Appropriately enough, I read this on Christmas Eve.

Early this year I read his book This Is Going To Hurt- extracts from his diaries from his days as a junior doctor. It's easily one of the two funniest books I've read this year.

The second of the funniest books I've read this year is this one. It's more extracts from his doctor diaries, but this time purely the shifts he did over the Christmas seasons in the 7 years he was a doctor. 

It's very short, hence being able to read it in one day without any issues. It's very funny and wince inducing.

There's a particularly painful image raised when he retells the story of a man who covered himself head to toe in gaffer tape (for sexual purposes apparently), and the negative impact of trying to remove it... If you've read this book and you're a man, you've probably just winced at the memory of it. I know I'm cringing as I write this.

The book has the same mix of funny and heartfelt, with serious messages about the state of the NHS and how badly the staff are treated.

Just like the previous volume, it's a must read. 

Number 66- Peter Crombie Vs the Grampires - Adam Millard

 I'm several books behind at t6he moment. the reason for this might be apparent in the backgrounds of the pictures in the next few posts.

This is the sequel to Peter Crombie Teenaged Zombie.  Peter is still a member of the undead, resurrected by his father who is still the leading mad scientist in town.

His best friend is still a vampire ghost and the really-not-his-type girl next door still has a major crush on him. 

What is new is that the monkey can talk and Count Dracula has moved into the local old folk's home and is creating an army of elderly vampires.

The scene is set for as epic a showdown as is possible in this sleepy little town.  Luckily, there's another stranger in town who might be able to help- if he can persuade people his name isn't Vannel Singh.

This is typical Adam Millard in younger readers mode, fast paced, funny and self referential.

He doesn't care about being politically incorrect, even in a book aimed at children.  This is packed full of the sort of comments that we read are being removed from Roald Dahl's children's books- particularly when referring to the attractiveness, or otherwise- of the neighbour girl, and her lithp. And it's all the funnier for it.

It's a quick easy read- as you'd expect from a children's book.  It's probably not a future classic of children's literature, but it's good fun with plenty of laughs to be found in the surrealist world he's created here.

Number 58 - Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch

 I'm starting to think Magical London is it's own specific subgenre of fantasy fiction. there's the Smallest things book i read recently, Un-Lun-Dun and King Rat by China Mieville, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, and the 8 books in this series to name a dozen off the top of my head.

This my first foray into this particular iteration on the theme and I have to say I'm impressed.

I was lead to believe that this was a Pratchett style high fantasy with a dozen laughs on each and every page. It's not that, but what it is is very good indeed.

Peter Grant is a young policeman just ending his two year probation and about to be posted into records rather than the excitement he wants on the streets.

He runs into an eyewitness to a recent brutal murder. The problem is that the eyewitness has been dead for 300 years.

This is the beginning of his awakening to the magic that surrounds his native city. 

He's recruited into a specialist unit instead, under Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who heads up his own very exclusive unit. Peter finds out that the serial killer the met is looking for is not the usual run of the mill murderer. In the course of his investigation he meets several more ghosts, at least one vampire and the human forms of the eponymous rivers of London who are themselves in the middle of their own internal fights which could cause trouble for the city.

There's a great imagination on display here. While I did say it's not Pratchett style. a dozen laughs a page funny, it is still very funny.  The plot comes before the humour though, and there are some very dark elements going on. Peter's narration is suitably cynical and does lead to a few belly laughs.

Aaronovitch clearly loves the London and the historical details about the city seem entirely convincing without feeling like a history lecture. The characters are well drawn, especially Grant, Leslie, and Nightingale. 

I was lucky enough to find a box set of all 8 books in the series for only £20 online. I will certainly be reading the full series There's a definite mystery linked to Nightingale's past that feels like it will be great fun to explore in the later volumes.

Number 15.5 - Don't Dress For Dinner - Marc Camoletti/Robin Hawdon

 A brilliantly funny farce I'm performing in at the end of May

Bernard's wife Jacqueline is going away for the weekend to see her mother so Bernard invites his mistress Suzanne over to stay.  He also invites his best friend Robert as an alibi so if anyone asks, he can say she's Robert's girlfriend. 

However, when he tells his wife Robert is coming over, she cancels her plans and decides to stay.  What Bernard doesn't know is that Robert is Jacqueline's lover. 

Robert goes along with the plan to pretend to be Suzanne's lover because otherwise Bernard will find out. When the hired cook Suzette arrives before Suzanne and introduces herself as Suzy, Robert declares her to be his girlfriend, much to her surprise and Jacqueline's disgust, and events rapidly spiral out of control. 

When Suzanne arrives, she has to be the cook, since Robert's "girlfriend" is already here.  Lies pile upon lies and things get incredibly confusing, as per all the best farces.

The quality of some of these lines make it difficult to believe that it's been translated from French. 

It's one of the funniest scripts I've read and we've got a really good cast (including me).

We perform the last week of May at Stepping Stones Nursery, Chorley Old Road, Bolton

The Marco Players event tickets from TicketSource.

Number 13 - The Song of the Quarkbeast - Jasper Fforde

 

And continuing my theme of "next book in the series" here we have book two of Jasper Fforde's young adult series.

The follow up to The Last Dragonslayer takes place a few weeks after the events of book one.  Magic is slowly increasing, but not that much, and is still not trusted by a fair percentage of the population.  It's subject to many rules and regulations.

However, a rival firm (iMagic) want to monopolise magic use in the kingdom and take over as the sole suppliers.  There's lots of lovely moolah to be made if they can force our heroes out of business. They challenge Kazam to a magical contest and will stop and nothing to win.

Jennifer Strange and her friends can't let this happen, obviously, and face many obstacles on the way to the duel, including random curses, arrests and general incompetence (their own and other people's) and a wandering Quarkbeast that could spell cause a catastrophe all of its own.

On the way our cast is expanded from the first book, and the history of this version of Britain is fleshed out still further.  

This is a hysterically funny read. Fforde has an almost unique gift for giving a genuinely good story along with all the jokes. His Nursery Crime novels offer proper who-dunnits alongside the surreal mayhem. This book is no exception. We (I do at least) genuinely care whether Jennifer and Tiger Prawns can bypass bureaucracy  to keep Kazam open. I was genuinely upset when one of the funniest running jokes in the series came to an unexpectedly dramatic and moving end. As the plot unfolds we can see how carefully the various threads have been layered into the story.

The story moves with lightning speed and I raced through this in just a few hours. It's never less than amusing and is frequently laugh out loud funny.

If you want a quick, easy and brilliantly funny read, try this series - but do it in order.  Things might get a touch convoluted.

Number 8.5 - This is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay

 

I actually read this last week, in the middle of the Paul Auster book, since I had a train trip midweek and this fit in my coat pocket (unlike the massive 760 page plus hardback).

This continues the theme for February of reading biographies.

Adam Kay was one half of comedy musical act Amateur Transplants, very funny and very sweary. Check out their song London Underground for possibly their finest hour.

These days he's writing for TV while he's not touring with his music. Before that, he was a doctor in London. This book is extracts from his diary during that time.

This is without doubt the funniest thing I've read in years. It reduced me to helpless tears of laughter several times, and at least one uncontrollable giggling fit that lasted nearly 10 minutes.

Kay has a knack for phrasing in a way that makes almost anything funny. Some of the stories in this really shouldn't be quite so hilarious, but the way he tells them makes it, as per the Stephen Fry quote on the cover, painfully funny.

It is also heartbreaking as per the Jonathon Ross quote. Whilst the majority of the book keeps you giggling out loud, every now and then, he pulls the rug out from under you with a genuinely sad story. The story of why he quit as a doctor is particularly sad. 

Another thing this book does his highlight exactly how much stress our NHS staff are under (and this was back in the noughties, it's only gotten worse in the intervening years). As well as making us laugh, this is a  heartfelt plea to save the NHS.  The point is made repeatedly how vital the NHS is to the country, and how pressured the doctors and nurses are. Humour is a great weapon to show the absurdities and truth behind  the kind faces you see when you enter an NHS hospital.

I work in IT for the NHS as my day job, and so much about the way the organisation runs rings true. I'm lucky in having a 9-5, but my job roles over the years have given me insight into how the wards run.  This book really threw open any blinds that were still closed to me. 

So this isn't just one of the funniest books you'll ever read, it's one of the most important if you value the health service in this country.

Number 70 - The Ladybird book of the Zombie Apocalypse

 After the Alice Sebold, I needed a palate cleanser.

This was ideal.  Short, pithy, masterful understatement in the humour. The first page suggests that, in a zombie apocalypse, there's a chance that shops may offer reduced services and stock. That's the level of the humour here and I liked it a lot.

Anyone who grew up with the old Ladybird Books will recognise the format and style of this one. Every page is accompanied by a picture in the style of, or taken from, an old Ladybird book, but with horribly inappropriate text on the page opposite. As pisstakes go, this is really quite effective. 

It kills 10 minutes easily enough. 20 if  you stop to examine the pictures in detail.

Nothing more to say- it was only 20 pages of text.

Number 49 - The Last Dragonslayer - Jasper Fforde

 

I've been a big fan of Jasper Fforde for many years. His books are endlessly strange, silly and funny. Normally i buy his books as soon as they come out.

This one came out a decade ago, but, I didn't bother because it's sold in the children's section (not even the YA). I finally got around to buying it when The Troll War  book came out this year (book 4 of this series) and I decided I might as well ch3eck them out.

I wish I'd bought it all those years back.  This is every bit as strange, silly and funny as any of his books for grown ups.  the only difference is that the lead character is a 15 year old girl.

This is set in the Kingdom of Hereford in the UnUnited Kingdoms of Great Britain in an alternate version of 2010.

Magic is going out of fashion with the rise of technology. A wizard can't cast even the smallest of spells without having to sign a mountain of paperwork (or face dire consequences).

Jennifer Strange, the narrator, is acting manager of one of the few wizarding emporiums left in the UUK. When all the precogs suddenly have the same vision, that the last dragon, who lives in its own allocated lands between Hereford and Brecon, is going to be slain on Sunday, around lunchtime, Jennifer's life is about to take a turn for the interesting.

As with all his other books, his worldbuilding is top notch. Even though this is supposedly  aimed at younger readers, he hasn't slacked in the slightest on his plotting, or his biting social commentary.  This is a really tightly plotted and well conceived storyline. You need to pay attention since a throwaway line early on could easily come back as a major plot detail. he slots the pieces of the story in brilliantly.  

Who is playing who? Which of the characters lying to her is lying the most? And what do they have to gain? Who can Jennifer trust, if anyone? Why does she have to be the chosen one? She has nothing special about her. She's an foundling orphan, indentured to the wizarding business until her 18th birthday.  She has no powers. just a sense of right and wrong.  That's not enough in a world where the fate of magic itself might rest on the events of Sunday lunchtime.

It's laugh out loud funny throughout. The humour is surreal, punny, very clever in places, and deeply satirical of corporate greed. 

The Chosen One plotline is nicely subverted and played differently than I've seen it play out before. I genuinely had no idea how he was going to pull the plot threads together in the final chapters, and I was deeply satisfied with the results (and this in a "Children's book"). 

I recommend you check out his website too. Jasper Fforde.com : Grand Central

It's easily the best author website I've experienced.

Number 42 - The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams

 

Book number 42 in the year has to be HHGTTG related. If that's not actually a law, it should be.

This year, that honour fell to this, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams's essays, the one HHGTTG short story - Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, and the existing 11 chapters of the book Adams was working on when he died.

It's a fascinating and well researched/compiled collection of Adams's writing outside of the novels.

His trademark humour shines through most of the essays and letters, regardless of how serious the subject matter might be. In some places, he's remarkably prescient in the ways computers would take over every aspect of life.

In others, he's not quite so accurate.  in one essay about the future of magazines, he says that unwanted advertising will be a thing of the past when magazines and newspapers start happening online... Oh how I wish that prediction had come true.

His story about traveling to Australia to try to compare a new personal submersible vehicle to raiding the backs of the local aquatic life (namely the local manta rays) is particularly funny.

The short story has been about for a long while but I'd managed to never read it before picking up this book.  It's everything you'd expect from Adams, except a lot shorter than usual. It's also dated rather badly due to the satirical ending which will probably be lost on anyone who doesn't know about 80's world (USA) politics. 

The novel extract is both brilliant and desperately sad.  Brilliant because it's so bleeding funny. desperately sad because it's unfinished.  It was a new Dirk Gently book, although apparently he was thinking of reworking the ideas into a Hitch Hiker's format. The plot was pretty much insane but certainly involved time travel.  I was really getting into the story, as hard as I was trying not to (because I knew it was only a fragment), and suddenly it just finished. We will never know what the relevance of Desmond the rhinoceros might be to estate agents battling talking kangaroos in the distant future. We'll never know why the femme fatale was missing only the back half of her cat. there's a deep seated tragedy in that.

Twenty years on, Adams is still one of the greatest geniuses to grace the world of comic literature. If the heaven he didn't believe in believes in him, I hope he's happy there and keeping the angels amused with his anecdotes about the sheer inconvenience of the afterlife. 

Number 4 - The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend

I first read this book in 1985 when I myself was nearly the same age as the titular hero. This has 70p written in pencil on the top of the first page inside, so it's easily possible that this is the very same copy that I read all those years ago.

I remember finding it very funny first time I read it, but I don't recall it being embarrassing laughing uncontrollably in public funny. 

That's the difference between reading this as a teenager, and reading this as an adult. This time round, I was sitting reading it on my lunch at work and several times dissolving in hysterical fits of giggles.

I have a less complicated relationship with the character this time too.  In 1985 I was skinny with dark hair and glasses - and liked to read a lot.  Especially after the tv show came out, the favoured insult from those so inclined was "Adrian Mole" in much the same way that kids matching that description now get called Harry Potter. That may have taken the shine off the books for me somewhat and may explain why I have still to read the other 4 Adrian books.

Top of the list of reasons why this was so much funnier this time is that I understand what the adults are talking about. Whilst I don't think I was quite as naïve as Adrian, I didn't get a lot of the little asides. The references to the books he's reading with some vastly wrong fact about the author - eg, reading a book "by some woman called Evelyn Waugh" or the biography of Kinsley Martin where he says it's strange that it doesn't mention that he wrote Lucky Jim.

Townsend captures the uncertainty of teenage life with total accuracy. You just know you wouldn't want Adrian anywhere near you, let alone in your close circle of friends.  He's irritating, self-absorbed, and obsessed with sex. He spreads chaos around him whether he means to or not (example Mr Braithwaite's letter). However we can't help but sympathise with him. Even though probably three quarters of his pain is imaginary, and most of the rest is self inflicted, we're privy to some of his most private thoughts and we can understand where he's coming from. And we know he does care about some things. 

I have a couple more of the rest of the series to track down - I want to get similar editions to this one if possible-  but I will be continuing the series sooner rather than later.

For quick easy, screamingly funny reads, this is a very difficult book to beat.

Number 2 - The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

 This book has attracted a lot of attention and sold millions so it has to have something going for it.  Richard Osman is one of those faces you can't seem to get away from lately on tv, whether it's a show that he hosts or guest spotting on other celebrity shows.  It was only a matter of time before he put out a book.

Most celeb books turn out quite average overall, but the man giant that is Mr Osman is known for his brains as well as his height 

Side note - I genuinely was a contestant (with my mum) on Pointless a couple of years back, just before I started writing this blog. Before filming, Richard and Xander come over and talk to the contestants. I'm not particularly tall, but I'm not short either.  When Richard Osman came over to shake my hand I was on eye level with his nipples (which were covered by his suit obviously). He's easily the tallest guy I've ever met. He seemed very nice as well.  

Are his writing talents as towering as his physicality?

It has 50 separate reviews either on the cover or the first two pages. That's overkill surely. The fact that I agree with the majority is irrelevant. 

This is a very good and very funny (in places) crime thriller. The members of the murder club are nicely drawn (although the two men are kind of sidelined and the women do most of the heavy lifting in the case) and the supporting cast are equally good.

There's some great misdirection going on and plenty of twists and turns. However it does rely too much on withholding information from the reader to prevent the mystery fans from having any real chance at working it out. The final reveal was somewhat disappointing to me in the way it was done. I can't say more because - spoilers obviously.

I expected to read this in his voice.  It often happens when you know what the writer sounds like, but in this case that didn't happen at any point.  In fact the different characters' voices are well delineated and have their own distinct rhythms.

It certainly kept me amused and intrigued as to what would happen next.  It's much better than average, especially considering it's a debut novel.  The except from the second book looks very intriguing too.

Cosy crime novels like this aren't my usual thing.  I normally go for the grittier side of things. So, I'm not sure it's a classic, but its a damned good fun read.

In case anyone was wondering, Me and my mum didn't win on Pointless but we didn't show ourselves up and I even got two separate "Well played Marc" comments from Richard. 

Number 42 - The Restaurant at the end of The Universe - Douglas Adams

 “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

 With an opening line like that, how can a book go wrong?  In this case it certainly can’t.

The Hitchhikers trilogy (all 5 books) have been a staple part of my existence since I was about 12.  Whenever I hit book 42 in a year, it has to be a HHGTTG related tome – if that isn’t the law it should be, and this year I decided on a long delayed reread of book 2.

Accidentally, I’ve chosen a very appropriate time to post this review as it’s the 20^th anniversary of Adams’ sad death.

This second part of the 5 part trilogy is a very loose adaptation of the last two episodes of the first radio series, and the first 3 episodes of the second. The first book finished with our favourite space travellers boarding the Heart of Gold on the planet Magrathea.

The second starts straight after the events of HHGTTG when Eddie the onboard computer on the Heart of Gold spaceship shutting down to help the drinks machine work out how to make a good cup of tea, just at the moment that a Vogon ship is about to launch an attack.

We're then launched into the events from the first couple of episodes of the second series, where Zaphod finds he's set himself a mission and wiped his memory of it. He soon finds himself at the headquarters of the Guide's publishers where the psychic lifts don't want to take him to the 15th floor.  They know what's about to happen.

After various misadventures involving a sense of perspective, fairy cake, and missing lemon scented napkins, he is reunited with the rest of the cast and they make their way to Milliways.  From then on the book pretty much follows the end of series 1 of the radio show, with a brief diversion to episode 3 of series 2. 

There's not a single page of this book that doesn't contain laugh out loud funny jokes, and/or seriously groan inducing puns.  The wordplay is genius throughout and Adams' natural cynicism shines through all of it.  I always wondered who was to blame for my sarcastic sense of humour.  rereading these points to a very likely suspect.

All 5 books in the trilogy are comic masterpieces.  Please note I don't count book 6 as part of the trilogy.  The end of Mostly Harmless makes it clear that Adams wanted it all to stop so he could write something else for a change. So book 6 was a cash cow and nothing else. 

Not much else to say.  Adams was a comedy god and is sadly missed. 

If you've not read the books, read them now and that's an order.

Number 13 - Peter Crombie: Teenage Zombie - Adam Millard

 After the brilliance that was Lanny, I needed something that would be as far away in style and content as possible so as to not invite comparison. A palette cleanser or an amuse bouche you might say.

This was an ideal choice.

When Peter Crombie is killed by a golf ball while walking past the golf course, his life becomes a lot more interesting.

His father is your stereotypical mad scientist and ressurrects his son in his lab in the basement. Soon Peter has made friends with a local ghost of a vampire and finds himself on a quest to stop a vampire queen from eating the local am-dram group.

Being aimed at the younger market this isn't as gruesome as Millard's other books but it certainly doesn't suffer because of that.

The story is told at breakneck speed and has punchlines almost every other paragraph. The jokes have a pretty good hit rate (although for me that could be at least partly down to my love of  Dad jokes) and this is therefore a damned funny piece of writing. There are atrocious puns galore, sideswipes at celebrity culture and some mercifully non-pc running jokes .

Adam Millard can always be relied on for a quick easy and laugh out loud funny read. There is a sequel to this sitting on my shelves and I will certainly be reading that sooner rather than later. 

This is a genuine guilt free fun read. If you want cheering up, go out and buy Adam's back catalogue. you won't regret  it.

  

Number 47 - Squirm - Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is another of those authors I've been collecting books by for well over a decade.  As far as I know I have everything he's written, but I am a couple of books behind on reading his YA books. 

His fiction novels all tend to have either one or two word titles.  The two word titles are all adult novels.  The one word titles are for younger people. 

In practice this means that there's no swearing, no sex and the violence is kept offscreen in the one word titles.  They're still the same brand of easy to read lunacy, normally with a very strong environmental message built in.

This one is no exception.  Billy Dickens is a Floridan high school kid who loves wildlife, and just happens to collect snakes.  He won't stand any nonsense and will always fight for the underdog.  This is typical of Hiaasen's lead characters.

Within the first two pages you can't help but like young Billy regardless of how unlikely some of his behaviour may be.

This is a very good thing since Billy is the first person narrator, telling us most of the story in the present tense.

His dad walked out on the family when he was a toddler.  In the first couple of chapters he finds out where his dad lives and cons his mother into letting him fly across the USA to Montana to meet him. His dad turns out to be an eco warrior chasing after a particularly nasty big game hunter and spoiling his hunts.

 Even though this is 276 pages it flies past as if it was half that length.  The weakness of the first person narration is that the bad guy barely features at all, but Billy is such an entertaining narrator that that doesn't really matter.  The closing chapters contain some genuine tension and the message about wildlife preservation is crystral clear without being sledgehammer style unsubtle. 

It's predictable once the pieces start slipping into place, but it's not written for adults.  However, as YA fiction goes, it's easily substantial enough to keep me entertained.  If I wanted to, I could probably pick a plot hole or two - but see the end of the first sentence in this paragraph.  And it's so entertaining it would be churlish to do so anyway.

This is still available from all good booksellers and probably quite a few bad ones as well. 

He has a new adult novel due out in the next month or so, and I've already preordered it.

Number 42 - A Liar's Autobiography - Graham Chapman

Book number 42 for the year has to be, by law, connected with Douglas Adams.  therefore I've naturally gone for the autobiography of Graham Chapman.

The link might not be immediately obvious, but there are a few.  Douglas Adams was a co-writer with Chapman on a sketch show.  He also wrote some material for Monty Python.

More importantly, he's one of six writers allegedly behind this book.  David Yallop, Alex Martin, Pedro Montt, David Sherlock, Douglas himself and of course there's some input from a geezer called Graham Chapman. I suspect Pedro Montt may be a fanciful addition to the list of writers since he's a dead ex-president of Chile....

When I picked this book up I wasn't entirely certain what to expect.

Now I've put it down again having read it, I'm not entirely sure what I just read.

It's certainly a pauntly enough read (those who've read the book will know what that means) and is laugh out loud funny in many places. However the opening chapters were a struggle to get through.   The randomness that characterised Python humour was in full flow and then some.  It made no effort in the opening chapters to give any type of coherent narrative, jumped about in time and even into space, and made zero sense.  That type of knockabout randomness might (and does) work when on a screen, whizzing past in a matter of a couple minutes, but sustained over 20 plus pages, it's a bit of a chore to get through.

It's possible he's putting on paper the feeling of the DT's that he's going through in chapter nought, but I can't say for certain.

However the style did settle down considerably and the narrative is a lot less cluttered and more readable from that point on.  It's almost impossible to know what is and isn't true in this book.  Some of the falsehoods are obvious, the flights of complete fancy etc.  Much of the rest of the book feels like anecdotes of reasonably amusing stories that have conflated over the years and expanded, so in the midst of the fabrication there's a real event or three going on.

There's one chapter that's actually incredibly moving (chapter 9 -  where he lets a pair of young men stay in his house to keep them out of trouble with the law) and, confusingly enough, there are swathes of this book that feel like he's laying his soul bare on the page for us to see with seering honesty.  He then spoils that effect every time with another digression into fanatasy.

I made the mistake of reading the chapters where he's at medical school while I was on my luch at work.  This is not advisable.  There is some gratuitously unpleasant description of  mucus and pus filled orificeses.

The footnotes scattered through the book are used to great comic effect.  He frequently seems to be having chats with his co-writers in the footnotes. Once the writing settled it was genuinely good fun to read.  The pictures scattered throughout are also pretty funny.  Try not to look at page 208 though.

The whole thing is very choppy, lots of little anecdotes with varying degrees of reliability in the telling.  Being an autobiography, obviously it just peters out at the end, although he does manage to close off a running joke type thing in the final pages which gives for a definite sense of an end even though it isn't one.

I'm glad I finally got round to reading it.  It's available from various online sources.  I got mine from the charity section at the front of my local Tesco about two years ago.

Number 40 - Big Lizard - Joe & Keith Lansdale

 

Looking back to when I started this blog, I'm surprised I've not reviewed a Joe R Lansdale book yet.  He's one of those authors who's so prolific it's pointless trying to catch up, so I try to get through one or two of his a year, in which time he puts out at least three.  He's like Stephen King in that regard.

He's also like Stephen King in that, despite an enormously large output, his quality never seems to dip. In fact he's a slight improvement on King in that regard since there are at least two King novels I don't want to read again, whereas, given the time, I would happily reread everything I've read by Lansdale.

This book is two Lansdale's for the price of one. Keith is Joe's son and has recently taken up the mantle on the Red Range comics/graphic novels created by his dad many moons ago.

Big Lizard is a superhero story with a difference.  A lot of differences.  A fuck ton of difference.

Buster Nix takes on a job as night security for Pick a Chicken, a local chicken joint where the patrons can, erm... pick their own chickens for their dinner, in much the same way as seafood places allow patrons to pick their own lobster from a tank.  In Pick-a-Chicken they can even despatch their own chicken with a company hatchet before it is cooked. 

He stumbles onto a satanic ritual in an outbuilding a few days into the job and knocks over a blazing brazier, disrupting the service and letting all kinds of hell  loose.  As a result of the botched ritual, he finds he has the ability to transform into a Big Lizard (about 8 foot nose to tail). 

The owner of the business, Elroy Cuzzins has been similarly transformed by the ritual and has become Big Chicken.  He is hell-bent on completing the ritual, which means killing several people, and it's up to Big Lizard and his friends, a teenage tech wizard and a normal sized but psychic talking chicken called Socrates, to stop Big Chicken in his tracks.

All in all this is as mad as a box of frogs.  There's some very strange but effective visual imagery going on in this book, as well as at least one point where you'll feel real sympathy for Buster.

This book is not going to win any Pulitzer prizes. it's way too much fun for that.  This is probably the funniest book I've read all year.  This is the sort of book to chill out and have a blast with.  And it does that just fine. I laughed out loud several times reading this.  There's no real poetry to the writing, but who needs poetry when you've got an 8 foot chicken on a killing spree?

There are even a few dangling plot threads for a potential sequel to pick up on.  I sincerely hope they're considering it. 

This is released in September this year from SST Publications.

https://sstpublications.co.uk/

Edited to Add

The version of this book that I read was the ARC, pictured above.  I've just recently (aka today) acquired a copy of the full end product complete with illustrations.

It's a gorgeous piece of work.  The illustrations are just as mad as the story. The binding and formatting is spot on.  It's one of those books where the quality of the paper used is so nice it's worthy of a mention.  So I'll mention it.  Even the quality of the paper is noticeably better than most books.

It's signed by Joe and Keith on one of the nicest looking signature pages I've seen (complete with its own set of illustrations). And all this for a lot less than most small presses charge for a high quality signed limited edition.

You need this book in your lives.  It will improve your entire existence. That is no word of a lie.